Chapter 41

Negro in the Woodpile

The Negro problem is a white man’s problem.

—Franz Schoenberner

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness; this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others…. One feels his two-ness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

—W. E. B. Du Bois

It is not good to be a Negro in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

—Rudyard Kipling

THAT the United States is very nearly 10 per cent a black nation is known to everybody and ignored by almost everybody—except maybe the 10 per cent. There are more than 13 million Negroes in this country; roughly every tenth American man, woman, and child is a Negro.

I had heard this often enough but until I reached the South I had no real perception of what it means.¹ I had heard words like “discrimination” and “prejudice” all my life, but I had no concrete knowledge, no fingertip realization, of what lies behind them. I knew that “segregation” was a problem; I had no conception at all of the grim enormousness of the problem. The phrase is trite, but I know no other; the Negro in the South has to be seen to be believed.

Dr. Ira de Augustine Reid picked me up in Atlanta one morning, and we spent some hours together. Dr. Reid, chairman of the department of sociology at the University of Atlanta, is a scholar of considerable distinction; he is a Columbia Ph.D., and the successor to Dr. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois as editor of Phylon, the Negro quarterly. But Dr. Reid (I know that this sounds innocent, but spend a few days around Atlanta yourself) was of course unable to accept my invitation to have a cup of coffee. He could not even meet me in my hotel room. He parked his car outside, contrived in some manner to send a message up, and waited on the street.

Atlanta University consists of seven different Negro institutions; Dr. Du Bois writes that “between 1900 and 1925, no work on the Negro and no study of the South was published which was not indebted in some respect to … Atlanta University.” I had good talks with its president, Dr. Rufus E. Clement, and with the president of one of its units, Dr. Benjamin E. Mays of Morehouse College. Both have great capacity—I thought that Dr. Mays was as intelligent as anybody I met in the whole South—and both, it goes without saying, are men of courtesy as well as erudition. I would have liked extremely to repay their hospitality. But it was not possible for me to do so in Atlanta, because I could not take them into any public place.

Atlanta is supposed to rank fairly high among southern cities in its attitude toward Negroes, but it out-ghettoes anything I ever saw in a European ghetto, even in Warsaw. What I looked at was caste and un-touchability—half the time I blinked remembering that this was not India.

Consider the case of Professor X, who is any Negro professor at Atlanta University. He works in close conjunction with several whites; but meeting him on the street after hours, they will not be likely to recognize or greet him. In a hotel, he must take the freight elevator, and under no circumstances can he eat in any but a quarantined restaurant or lunchroom. He is too proud to go to a Jim Crow theater; therefore he can scarcely ever see a first-run movie, or go to a concert. If he travels in a day coach he is herded like an animal into a villainously decrepit wooden car. If he visits a friend in a suburb, he will find that the water, electricity, and gas may literally stop where the segregated quarter begins. He cannot as a rule try on a hat or a pair of gloves in a white store. Not conceivably will a true southern white shake hands with him, and at a bus terminal or similar point he will, of course, have to use the “colored” toilet, and drink from a separate water fountain. He is expected to give the right of way to whites on the sidewalk, and he will almost never see the picture of a fellow Negro in a newspaper, unless of a criminal. His children must attend a segregated school; they could not possibly go to a white swimming pool, bowling alley, dance hall or other place of recreation. When they grow up, no state university in the entire South will receive them.

I mentioned Dr. Mays above. Recently ex-Governor Arnall (one of the best progressives in the South!) had occasion to write him an official letter. Arnall was in a quandary. He could not, of course, address Dr. Mays as “Mister” or “Doctor,” even in correspondence. The taboo on this has been ironclad for years. Finally he hit on the device of simply calling him “Benjamin.”²

Dr. Du Bois, who has a position almost like that of Shaw or Einstein, being the most venerable and distinguished of leaders in his field, tells in one of his autobiographical passages how he was not allowed to enter the Atlanta public library. Dr. Du Bois is, of course, a Harvard Ph.D. who also went to the University of Berlin and who holds three other doctorates.

Turn to the white side briefly. I asked a young, intelligent, and quite “liberal” politician to explain some aspects of all this on a strictly personal basis; I tried to get from him exactly what he would and would not do. Eat with a Negro? Good God, no! Go to a Negro’s house? Not under any circumstances. (“Ah couldn’t afford it; might get known.”) Go to a reception for, say, Paul Robeson? (“Couldn’t happen here; if it was in New Yohk Ah might go if it was a big crowd and Ah wasn’t known.”) Shake hands with a Negro? (“Ah shook hands with one in Pohtland, Oregon, last year; fust time in mah whole life!”) Sleep with a pretty Negro girl? Answer confused.

The basic pattern of segregation in the South is unwavering and absolute, though minor modifications come from time to time. Technically segregation is simply a term to denote the various strictures separating Negroes from whites, and it has manifestations all the way from the laws prohibiting intermarriage to such taboos as that which commonly forbids a Negro to argue with a white man. It has existed since the first Negroes arrived at Jamestown in 1619; slavery was simply the first form of segregation. It not only includes Jim Crowism in schools and places of amusement, but such items in “etiquette” as the principle that a southern Negro must go into a white man’s house by the back door. Return to such a matter as transportation. In Atlanta, taxicabs driven by whites serve whites only.³ As to busses Negroes are of course obliged to squeeze into the back seats everywhere in the South; in Mississippi they may actually be separated from whites by a curtain. The analogy to India—purdah !—comes to mind again.

But in some respects segregation is breaking down. I watched Negroes shopping in the best Atlanta department store (they could not, however, work as clerks there), and whereas before World War II it was almost unthinkable that a Negro girl should serve whites at a drugstore fountain or similar establishment, this is now fairly common. I saw Negroes and whites standing together in lines at post-office windows and at Western Union counters, and while I was in Atlanta the Journal, for the first time in its history, gave a Negro woman the title “Miss.” In another field Negroes may now join some of the great fraternal orders. Mostly the loosening up of strictures favors rich Negroes. For instance those who can afford Pullman space do not have to ride in segregated cars though they will usually be given a compartment and thus sterilized off from the rest of the train, and, as is obvious, those who have automobiles are relieved of much Jim Crow nuisance, though some filling stations may refuse to serve them. An illuminating minor point is that such an organization as the Southern Regional Council, with white and black membership, evades segregation by having its mixed meetings in Negro houses or places of assembly.

The economic cost of segregation is of course preposterous and staggering. It is a cardinal reason why the South is so poor. In effect, it means that two sets of everything from schools to insane asylums to penitentiaries to playgrounds have to be maintained.

Of course, too, whites make use of segregation as a pretext for economic discrimination and exclusion; the caste system is applied to jobs. A white employer will say, “Why, yes, I’d like to employ good niggers, but how could I have them in the lunchroom?” Similarly consider cultural matters. The white will affirm, “Sure, I believe in education for Negro kids, but!—” The “but” in the unfinished sentence expresses the social (which becomes an educational) taboo.

Segregation—we are by no means finished with this subject; of necessity it will carry through this whole long chapter—has one aspect sometimes neglected, that thousands upon thousands of good white citizens never have any contact at all with Negroes except with servants and employees in the service trades; they become as isolated from the Negro community as from a tribe of Bantus; whites and blacks of similar professional interests almost never meet. There are 55,000 Negro college graduates in the United States.⁴ Most southern whites have never seen one.

One effect of this has, naturally, been to drive Negroes into what Myrdal calls “self-segregation,” as a means of preserving what is left of their self-respect. Listen to Du Bois: “In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes … in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches—one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and street cars.”⁵

Not long ago, but before World War II was over, a young Negro girl was asked how she would punish Hitler. Answer: “Paint him black and bring him over here.”⁶

Word about a Book

In Washington, D.C., when I was starting my trip and long before I reached Atlanta, I asked a group of friends what I should look out for most. One was a justice of the Supreme Court, one an assistant secretary of state; they all know this country much better than I do, and in giving me advice they mentioned the Mississippi Delta, wheat in Montana, mill towns in New England, the TVA, rehabilitation in the dust bowl; similarly they recommended various people and institutions; finally they said that one thing indispensable to understanding of the United States was a book—An American Dilemma, by Gunnar Myrdal.⁷

This study of “The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,” by a Swedish sociologist who worked for several years in the field with a competent staff, runs to 1,483 large, full, tight-packed pages; there are 258 pages just of footnotes. I know no book quite like it. As the last word in analytical insight on a subject it resembles to a degree Sir George Sansom’s superb Cultural History of Japan, and though it may lack the latter’s grace it outranks it in exhaustiveness. Nobody has much right to discuss the Negro in America until he has looked into Myrdal’s book. (I say “looked into” rather than “has read” because to read it takes at least a month.)

Myrdal makes a major hypothesis at the outset—that the Negro problem is above all one of morals, heart and conscience. He describes with great acuteness the “American Creed,” the body of belief in liberty and equality embodied in law that chiefly distinguishes the United States from all other nations, and proceeds, “Though our study includes economic, social and political race relations, at bottom our problem is the moral dilemma of the American.” He says too, “The reading of this book must be … an ordeal to the good citizen.” The enormous discrepancy it reveals between what Americans preach in regard to the Negro and other issues, and what they practice, is painful to survey. “The American Negro problem is a problem in the heart of the American.”

An American Dilemma is so extraordinarily copious that it may be unfair to pick out only one other major point—Myrdal’s belief that the Negro is not, per se, inferior to the white man, but that his seeming inferiority is the result of poverty, lack of education, and discrimination. Like all modern anthropologists, Myrdal attacks the myth of race—incidentally the word “race” itself is less than two hundred years old—and together with an elaborate amount of other material he adduces various United States Army tests to indicate that some northern Negroes are more intelligent than some southern whites.⁸ Be this as it may. A contrary view exists. Negroes may resent my saying so, but many observers will hold it to be undeniable, in some parts of the country at least, that many Negroes are of less capacity than whites. Of course this may indeed be the result of generations of grinding white pressure, of segregation and all the perjuries of the human spirit this entails, of the appalling uglinesses that occur when a whole community is forced into perpetual Coventry. The real point is something else. Whether the Negro is at present “inferior” or not is not the issue. The issue is that, no matter how “inferior” he may or may not be, he is still entitled to civil liberties, equality of treatment, and the ordinary privileges of American democracy. The status of imputed inferiority is no excuse for the prejudices that make him a third-class citizen.

Violence: the Record

All I ask for the Negro is that if you do not like him, let him alone.

—Abraham Lincoln

Here are some advertisements that Charles Dickens found in American newspapers in 1842:

Ran away, a negro woman. A few days before she went off I burnt her with a hot iron on the left side of her face. Tried to make the letter M..

One hundred dollars reward for a negro fellow, Pompey. … Branded on left jaw.

Fifty dollars reward for the negro Jim Blake. Has a piece cut out of each ear.

Twenty-five dollars reward for my man John. The tip of his nose is bit off.⁹

Today, 105 years later, here are some things that still happen:

Item: A twenty-eight-year-old Negro named John C. Jones was arrested in Minden, Louisiana, because of “suspicion” that he had tried to break into the house of a white woman. No formal charges were brought, and Jones and Albert S. M. Harris Jr., a seventeen-year-old friend, were released. Both were then “picked up by unidentified persons.” Jones’s body was found in the woods a few days later. Both his hands had been chopped off, and he had been killed by application of a blow torch to his head, throat, and body. Harris, though badly beaten, was still alive, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People immediately brought the case to country-wide attention. The local authorities made no arrests, however, and discovered “no clues in connection with the reputed mob action.”¹⁰

Item: Near Lexington, Mississippi, a thirty-five-year-old Negro tenant farmer named Leon McAttee was flogged to death by five whites; his body was left to rot in a bayou. The five assailants were indicted for manslaughter, inasmuch as they admitted that they had hit their victim “a few licks,” and were brought to trial. A jury acquitted them after being out ten minutes. McAttee had been accused of the theft of a saddle. After the trial two other people confessed to the theft.¹¹

Item: Because of libel laws, I cannot describe what is probably the most outrageous lynching in the United States in recent years. Two citizens of local prominence were interestingly involved. It occurred in Tennessee.

Item: In Athens, Alabama, in August, 1946, two white boys and a Negro had a scuffle. An honest white policeman refused to arrest the Negro, on the ground that he was not the aggressor; he did arrest the whites. A mob numbering between 1,800 and 2,000 thereupon stormed the city hall, forced the release of the white boys, and began to riot; Negroes were chased off the streets and between fifty and one hundred were injured. When order was restored nine whites were taken into custody on charges of “unlawful assembly.” They were released later. Eight were teen-agers; the youngest, thirteen years old, “carried a club and knocked Negroes down.”¹²

Item: In Columbia, Tennessee, the home town of President James K. Polk, a Negro woman complained of incivility in a white shop, and a fracas occurred. That night, in February, 1946, mobs penetrated into Mink Slide, the Negro quarter; frightened Negroes feared a pogrom because the town has a bad race relations history, and, after they had been fired on, they opened ill-organized fire with shotguns on the white intruders. Nobody was seriously hurt. But state troopers and police “cleaned up” the district the next day, smashing houses and wantonly destroying shops and stores, in a savage little reign of terror. Twenty-five Negroes were arrested for “attempted murder”—while two others were actually murdered in the town jail!¹³ The trial of the twenty-five took place at Lawrenceville, Tennessee, and became a nation-wide cause célèbre, because almost every aspect of the Negro problem was distilled and concentrated in its proceedings. For instance the defendants had to travel fifty-three miles each way every day, since Lawrenceville, a small hamlet, had no facilities for handling them; the Negroes and their lawyers had no access to toilets, a lunchroom, or even drinking water. Twenty-three of the twenty-five defendants were acquitted after a two-week trial. Vincent Sheean, describing this episode in the New York Herald Tribune, contributed to the nation some of the finest journalism of our time.

Item: On February 12, 1946, a Negro veteran named Isaac Woodard, who had received his honorable discharge papers only a few hours before and who was still in uniform, took a bus at Atlanta for his home in South Carolina. When the bus stopped at a hamlet Woodard asked the driver if he could go to a rest room. The driver refused and a violent quarrel ensued. At the next stop, Batesburg, South Carolina, the driver called a policeman, saying that Woodard had made a disturbance; the policeman took him off the bus, started beating him, carted him off to the local jail, and ground out his eyes with the end of his club. Woodard as a result lost his eyesight. This case too became a country-wide scandal. A mass rally held in the Lewisohn Stadium in New York raised a purse of $22,000 for the blinded veteran. It did not restore his vision.

Attorney General Clark and the FBI instituted an investigation, after much public clamor, and the Batesburg police officer was identified, arrested, and brought to trial. His name was, and is, Lynwood E. Shull. The charge, brought “in a criminal information filed by the Department of Justice,” was that Shull violated Woodard’s “civil rights” by beating him. Shull’s reply was that he had acted in self-defense. A United States district court jury acquitted Shull in half an hour.

This whole saga took place in the home state of former Secretary of State James F. Byrnes, during a year in which Mr. Byrnes was active in the extreme pleading for justice, democratic procedures, and fair play in regard to Bulgarian elections and the frontiers of Trieste.

Another type of mob outrage sometimes occurs in the South: clandestine or “underground” lynching in which a Negro who has broken taboos simply disappears. There is no corpus delicti, and no scandal. The body is never found, and people say that the victim has “moved” somewhere. For a time members of the Ku-Klux Klan were most distinguished for this kind of affair.

* * * * *

Why cannot the federal authorities act more effectively in lynching cases? Why, if the FBI can ferret out the secrets of the most intricate spy rings with remarkable dispatch, cannot it identify successfully a handful of thugs in Monroe, Georgia? This is a question that the stranger to America may legitimately ask. The answer is complex. For one thing the average southern community will seal itself into a protective web against any outsider with truly impenetrable effect. More important is that old bugaboo, state rights. Crime in this country is a matter for each individual state except in such categories as income tax evasion, counterfeiting, kidnapping across state lines, and the like. The federal government cannot bring anybody to trial on a murder charge except in special circumstances. “There has never been a successful federal prosecution of lynching, per se,” according to the New York Times.¹⁴ The Department of Justice can intervene in a lynching, under federal civil rights statutes, only if an official or agent of the state is involved, and southern states, notoriously touchy, do not easily admit such involvement. Even if they do, convictions are extremely difficult to obtain before a white jury—especially when the case may be handled by local officials of the federal government whose sympathies are those of the white community.

The effect of World War II is one point worth noting. Almost every victim of lynching since the war has been a veteran. The Negro community is probably more unified today, more politically vehement, more aggressive in its demand for full citizenship—even in the South—than at any other time in history. Roughly one million Negroes entered the armed services. They moved around and saw things; they were exposed to danger and learned what their rights were; overseas, many were treated decently and democratically by whites for the first time in their lives; the consequent fermentations have been explosive. Also since Negroes were presumably fighting for democratic principles on the international plane, it was difficult to keep them from wondering why the same principles were not applied at home. It wasn’t easy for an intelligent Negro to accept that he was fighting for democracy—in a largely Jim Crow army. The glaring crudity of this paradox became the more striking as the war went on. One famous remark is that of the Negro soldier returning across the Pacific from Okinawa. “Our fight for freedom,” he said, “begins when we get to San Francisco.”

The war shook up southern whites too. Consider merely the vast plantings of new industry with many thousands of Negro workers, and the fact that, because of the climate, a substantial percentage of Army training camps were located in the South. Negroes—who on occasion threw their weight around—became disconcertingly numerous and conspicuous. The very fact that they were soldiers (though 90 per cent were confined to labor battalions, construction work and so on) was bitterly resented. All this served to stimulate postwar mobbism. In a sense the recent lynchings were a retaliation by whites for an increased aggressiveness in the Negro community as a whole.

In this picture any amelioration is good news, and it is only proper to report changes for the better. Recently in North Carolina (where even burglary may be punished by the death sentence) a Negro boy raped a woman who was eight months pregnant. He confessed and was sentenced to die. The governor, R. Gregg Cherry, promptly commuted the sentence to life imprisonment, on the ground that though the crime was revolting, “part of the blame arises from the neglect of the state and society to provide a better environment.” What is more, Mr. Cherry’s action was generally commended by the white citizenry, not condemned.

In the South there were six lynchings last year. This is certainly an ugly figure, especially as it came after a succession of years in which mob violence was rare. Gradually, until 1946, a steady statistical improvement has taken place. When Dr. Du Bois was a student at Atlanta, the fingers of lynched Negroes might be seen in white butcher shops, and the country as a whole averaged five lynchings a week; in 1892, there were 235, without a single case being punished. Compare 1941, with four lynchings, or 1945, with only one. Decent Southerners themselves have of course worked hard and well to reduce violence; one of the most interesting organizations in the United States is the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching. Other groups public and private—notably the NAACP—are busy all the time, especially among the helot whites.

However, let us not be too complacent. The significance of lynching is often not the crime itself, horrible as that may be, but the terrorizing and demoralizing effect of the threat of lynching on a community. Also the double standard still exists strikingly, and whites generally go scot free for crimes that Negroes are butchered for. As an example, the Negro wife of a Negro serviceman overseas was raped by four whites in a small town in Alabama in early 1945; the case made a minor furor, but nobody was ever punished.

Shades of Spartacus

Some doubt the courage of the Negro. Go to Haiti, and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask them what they think of the Negro sword.

—Toussaint l’Ouverture

Outlanders may be shocked and surprised at some of the indignities Negroes suffer in the South; likewise they may be affronted and shocked at the outspokenness of some modern Negroes. To anybody who does not watch the Negro press carefully, the line taken by such a man as George S. Schuyler, one of the nation’s outstanding journalists, must indeed be astonishing. Listen to Mr. Schuyler:¹⁵

By a peculiar logical inversion the Anglo-Saxon ruling class, its imitators, accomplices, and victims, have come to believe in a Negro problem. … While there is actually no Negro problem, there is definitely a Caucasian problem.

Continual reference to a Negro problem assumes that some profound difficulty has been or is being created for the human race by the so-called Negroes. This is typical ruling class arrogance, and … has no basis in fact. It has been centuries since any Negro nation has menaced the rest of humanity. The last of the Moors withdrew from Europe in 1492.

The so-called Negroes … have passed few if any Jim Crow laws … set up few white ghettoes, carried on no discriminatory practices against whites, and have not devoted centuries of propaganda to prove the superiority of blacks over whites. …

While we may dismiss the concept of a Negro problem as a valuable dividend-paying fiction, it is clear that the Caucasian problem is painfully real and practically universal. Stated briefly, the problem confronting the colored peoples of the world is how to live in freedom, peace, and security without being invaded, subjugated, expropriated, exploited, persecuted, and humiliated by Caucasians justifying their actions by the myth of white racial superiority.

The term Negro itself is as fictitious as the theory of white racial superiority on which Anglo-Saxon civilization is based, but it is nevertheless one of the most effective smear devices developed since the Crusades. … Of course “white” and “Caucasian” are equally barren of scientific meaning. … There are actually no white people except albinos who are a very pale pink in color …

Do not, friends in Macon or Mobile, jump out of the window at this and say that Mr. Schuyler must be a “Communist,” which would be another smear device. Actually he is a prosperous and perfectly respectable citizen who, I believe, often votes Republican.

Mr. Schuyler of course states an extreme view. But consider other straws in the wind: (a) in Washington, D. C., recently a Negro dance hall refused admittance to a white, on the ground that “discrimination (!) in the nation’s capital must go”; (b) the NAACP opposed vigorously a plan to train Negro pilots in their own squadrons at Tuskegee, on the ground that this served to perpetuate segregation (normally one would have thought that Negroes would have been delighted to have their own aviation cadets); (c) wounded Negroes at Anzio and on Iwo Jima on several occasions refused to accept white plasma.

In Atlanta it was interesting to learn that Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit, which whites considered extremely Negrophile, was deeply resented by many Negroes. They didn’t like it that the heroine, a well-brought-up, college-educated Negro girl, should do anything so disgraceful as have an affair with a white boy! Actually a well-known Negro actress refused to play the part when a drama based on the book reached Broadway.

Negro “nationalism” takes extravagant form sometimes. I once asked a northern Negro for a list of eminent but little-known members of his race, and he proudly included two or three Negro criminals! Seriously one should never neglect the fact that Negro prejudice against the ignorant poor white in the South is probably as deep rooted and active as that of the poor white against the Negro.

Statistics, Sex, and Segregation

The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of … millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood.

—W. E. B. Du Bois

Of the total of roughly 13 million Negroes in the United States, some-where between nine and ten million live in the South; in ten specific states the approximate proportion is as follows:

Mississippi	49%
South Carolina	46%
Louisiana	37%
Georgia	37%
Alabama	36%
Florida	29%
North Carolina	29%
Virginia	27%
Arkansas	26%
Tennessee	18%

Tension between white and Negro is most acute, of course, in the states with the higher percentages. Yet this does not tell the whole story, since there are plenty of counties in several states where the population is 50 per cent Negro or more; some Mississippi counties have a Negro proportion of 80 per cent or greater.¹⁶ It is in these (pace Mr. Schuyler) that the Negro “problem” is to be found in its most extreme and exacerbated form.

There were approximately four million slaves in the South when emancipation came; free Negroes numbered about half a million all over the country. Less than three generations ago, in other words, nine out of ten Negroes were a lump of property; Negroes today, eighty years later, are still overwhelmingly of slave origin. This is an emotional factor not to be ignored, and it plays a considerable role not merely in the demarcation between black and white, but in the stratifications of the Negro community itself.¹⁷

How deeply do American Negroes today feel their roots in Africa, and do many want to return there? Very few. The Bilbo “solution,” that of forcible mass transplantation of the entire Negro population to Liberia and the Gold Coast, has utterly no support among responsible people. A “return to Africa” has, however, been a recurrent theme in arguments over the Negro ever since Thomas Jefferson founded the Africa Colonization Society; even Lincoln flirted with the idea of an African hegira. During World War I a remarkable pure black man named Marcus Garvey, who was born in Jamaica, started a “Back to Africa” movement; his cohorts wore uniforms, marched in Harlem, organized an African “government,” and even bought a steamship line. But very few actually set sail, and eventually Garvey was sentenced to prison for using the mails to defraud. (Later he went to Great Britain, where he stood for Parliament on one occasion.) Today, practically all remnants of his or any similar movement have disappeared.

* * * * *

We reach now a field of extreme and forbidding difficulty. It is virtually impossible to get accurate figures, but the best estimate is that roughly 6 million out of the 13 million Negroes in America are mulattoes. Intermarriage is forbidden in every southern state (and some northern), and so what this enormous figure means is that a very considerable amount of extramarital lovemaking and extralegal childbearing has been going on. A corollary point at once arises—how is a Negro to be defined? Almost half the Negroes in the United States today have what Myrdal calls Caucasoid ( = white) blood. Lots of folk have been intimate with lots of folk! What is a Negro? For almost 50 per cent of the community, the answer is—someone partly white!

Mixed marriages occur in the North; there are, in fact, about 15,000 in the country today.¹⁸ Frederick Douglass, one of the first great Negro educators, had a white wife, and so did another Negro scholar, William Scarborough, a professor of Greek who married Sarah Bierce, principal of the Wilberforce Normal School—this last did not, Du Bois writes tartly, provoke any “social catastrophe.”¹⁹ Jack Johnson, former heavy-weight champion of the world, had two white wives. Of course taboos on this subject are still violent. If you want really to infuriate a southern white, all you have to do is mention casually that several well-known contemporary Negroes have white wives—for instance Mr. Schuyler, the novelist Richard Wright, and William Grant Still, the musician. Mention that such a wife may be a southern white woman, like Mrs. Schuyler, and almost literally there will be blood vessels, or something else, broken in the room.

Many Negroes, however, it should be added at once, dislike miscegenation as much as do whites.

As to extramarital relationships they too make a complex story, and the roots go far back. One of the first legal actions in the history of Virginia was the punishment of a white planter found with a Negro girl; he was ordered to be thrashed, “for the discipline of his body, and for sinning against the glory of the Lord.” There are Negro families in the United States today that have had white blood since before the Mayflower. The whole subject is cloaked by hypocrisy; yet that there should have been sexual connection between white and black was altogether inevitable. Even today, many southern white boys grow up with “Mammies,” and this can make for much emotional confusion, in that, as Lillian Smith once put it, their first “intimacies and restraints come from two people, one from each race.” A boy grows up, and pressures of the most varied sort—from the “daredevil” attitude that it is “the thing to do” to the virginal restraints of white girls of his own class—drive him to the arms of Negro women. Still later, after marriage, there may be continuing influences prompting him “to break the color line.” But usually a liaison with a black girl gives a white man a strong (though perhaps subconscious) sense of guilt, which may express itself later in the form of the most violent Negrophobia. The errant puritan punishes someone else for his own profligacy.

Lillian Smith and Paula Snelling write:²⁰

No white Southerner with a trace of decency in his soul can feel guiltless before the knowledge that there are six million brown Americans in this country today whose white ancestors, with few exceptions, abrogated every human obligation of parenthood, not only leaving the physical, financial, psychic and moral burden of their individual rearing to the Negro mother and her race, but passing segregation laws and entrenching customs whereby their blood-children are excluded from opportunity to develop their full potentialities as human beings.

Many Negroes—once again I am having to foreshorten crudely a subject of the most delicate complexity—have hatred and contempt for white women. They and their ancestors have had to sit by for two hundred and fifty years, and watch white boys take mistresses among Negro girls, while they themselves could not possibly touch a white woman. They lost their own women, and a transition to resenting white women too, and holding them partially to blame, was inevitable. Several times southern women, those emancipated enough to have mixed committee dealings and so on, told me that only rarely will even an educated Negro approach them without self-consciousness. Their eyes “don’t touch.” The women may feel self-conscious too. One lady informed me that the first time a Negro ever “looked” at her, she felt “naked.” Finally, in mixed gatherings a Negro will sometimes be markedly aggressive, as a compensation for his instinctive fear and feeling of inferiority, and of course his vanity may be inflamed vastly if a white woman likes him.

What is the attitude of a “pure” Negro toward the mulattoes? Opinion can be very divergent here. On the one side, it is all but indubitable that many black Negroes hate their own blackness, and as a general rule those already mixed tend to “marry as light as they can.” That the woman is lighter than the man in at least two-thirds of all Negro marriages is sufficient proof of this, and it is a familiar locution that “the blacker you are, the harder things are for you.” Many Negroes speak of “good” and “bad” hair, and are proud of a child born with hair straight and not kinky. On the whole, too, the very dark are apt to be jealous of the lighter. A Negro can be a militant fighter for equality vis-à-vis whites, but he may try to get his hair straightened just the same. Then he will apologize to his black fellows with some such glancing remark as “Straight hair is easier to comb!”

On the other hand there are plenty of Negroes—chiefly intellectuals—who profess great pride in pitch blackness, and who despise octoroons who “pass” or try to “pass.” Most of those to whom I talked about mulattoes found the subject painful; it seemed to be a symbol of shame and defeat, meaning essentially that their women had betrayed them. “Passing” is a whole subject in itself. No Negro would despise Walter White for passing; of course Walter White, who could pass easily, never does. Before the war, a good many light Negroes thought that it was “smart” to pass; this tendency is believed to be diminishing. Some Negroes pass in the South, because they will not submit to the indignities of Jim Crow, but not in the North; some pass only when traveling; some very pale Negroes pass by accident, as it were. A conductor will say, “White coach this way,” and the octoroon obeys because to do differently will provoke too much fuss.

A proud but healthy attitude to variation in color is that of Du Bois. He wrote once of the joy given him by “the whole gorgeous color gamut of the American Negro world; the swaggering men, the beautiful girls, the laughter and gaiety, the unhampered self-expression … to be among people of my own color or rather of such various and extraordinary colors …”

Negroes can almost invariably tell who is a Negro, no matter how light. One Negro friend of mine, who lives in the North and who can pass without effort, made a business trip recently to Memphis. He had a quick lunch at the hotel drugstore. Several whites sat beside him, without dreaming that he was a Negro. The Negro counterman, however, detected him instantly, and showed his appreciation of the situation by saying casually, “Good mawnin’, suh!”

* * * * *

Segregation equals sex. Or perhaps one should say merely that sex is the basic reason for segregation. The strictures that forbid whites and Negroes to eat together, drink together, play together, talk together are at bottom the result of white fear that such intimacies will lead to a breakdown in sexual barriers, and the involvement of blacks with white women. A dozen times I heard whites say, “Of course I want full equality for Negroes—but under segregation!” Many years ago, visiting the United States, H. G. Wells reported the remark, “If you eat with them, you’ve got to marry ’em!” Indeed the issue is so distorted that, in the South, almost anybody who takes a strong line against segregation is apt to be accused of “advocating mixed sexual relations.”²¹ But, as pointed out above, to most Negroes themselves intermarriage is not a vital preoccupation; it is an issue as remote as the Himalayas. What the overwhelming mass want is not a chance to marry a white woman, but equal treatment and justice in the realms of economics, politics, and law, and opportunity to educate brown children decently.

Last word on sex. The illusion is widespread that rape and attacks on white women are the chief cause of lynching. As it happens this is not true. Of 2,522 Negroes lynched during the past twenty-six years, only 477—a shade under 20 per cent—were even charged with any sex offense.²²

Black on White

The Negro is a problem to himself.

—Gunnar Myrdal

What does the Negro himself think of segregation? Agreement is all but universal among leaders: they say simply “Segregation must go,” and have this as the alpha and omega of their position. But there are some oldsters, the “Uncle Toms” and “handkerchief heads” who “want to stay in good” with the ruling whites and who equivocate on the issue; also a smattering of “Quislings,” Negroes who take the white side. I have heard the phrase, by one Negro about another, “He sold out on segregation.”

Actually it is sometimes quite difficult, and understandably so, to get a frank statement about the subject. Most Negroes, through bitter experience, have become suspicious of white curiosities; they will answer questions in controversial fields by saying what they think the white man wants them to say; in order to survive at all, the Negro has always had to lie. A good many try to avoid being pinned down by saying that all they want is genuine “equality of opportunity.” But the catch here, which they don’t always appreciate, is that real equality ot opportunity isn’t possible unless segregation goes. The white man continues to impose segregation partly because it automatically serves to maintain discrimination in economic as well as social fields.

Almost all Negroes agree on a general strategic aim, the eventual abolition of segregation; they may vary in techniques and procedures. The radicals want direct action; the moderates put faith in gradualness. Most Negroes realize that Jim Crow cannot be done away with overnight; I heard the president of a famous Negro university say, “There are easier ways to take a fortress than by direct assault.” Also the attitude of a given leader, like that of Du Bois, may change from time to time as circumstances change. The policy of most responsible Negroes today is to do what they can to ameliorate the evils of segregation, while living within its structures, or, in more technical words, “to work for full equality within the bi-racial pattern, in every field where discrimination takes place.”

I have used the phrase “direct action.” But what direct action could Negroes take? One possibility might be a nation-wide withdrawal of their children from the public schools, which would almost certainly provoke a first-class crisis. But that the community would gain by such a drastic measure, even granting that the boycott could be made permanent, is very doubtful. A generation of Negro children would grow up without education, and education is their strongest need and greatest weapon for the future.

What are the chief Negro grievances aside from segregation? One could make a list pages long, as to wit:

To a considerable extent, Negroes are relegated to the worst kinds of work, for instance in turpentine camps and fertilizer factories. If a factory lays men off, the Negroes will most likely lose their jobs first, and a tradition has it that they shall not be paid more than 75 per cent of what whites get for the same work. Some types of employment are altogether closed, especially to women, who can scarcely ever get white-collar jobs—for instance as stenographers. This means that most of them have to go into domestic service.

Average life expectancy for the Negro is 50.52 years, as against 60.6 for whites. Deaths in childbirth average 33 per 1,000 for Negro women, as against a white rate of 11.3.

Negroes cannot possibly get the truth told in any but a handful of southern or other newspapers, on any controversial point involving race. They are the permanent target of white demagogues like Bilbo and such a creature as the late Mr. Talmadge, without having any way to answer back.

In the United States as a whole $80.26 is spent per year per pupil on education. The amount for Negroes in ten southern states is $17.04.

What the South needs above all is doctors, teachers, dentists, veterinarians, engineers. But only after surmounting the most savage handicaps can Negroes get degrees in these fields.

Suppose a Negro is traveling by car, and, outside his own community, has a traffic accident and is arrested by a white policeman. The consequences may not be pleasant. As much as anything, the Negro dislikes his “unprotected status.” Take Atlanta. There are 100,000 Negroes there, and not a single Negro policeman.

He resents it that his wife is called a “Negress” and his child a “pickaninny,” and he doesn’t like the terms “high yaller,” “darkie,” or “quadroon.”²³

What does the Negro want? Several different phrases express the same idea, and I heard them universally—“equal rights without reservations”; “real participation in American life”; “integration into the United States”; “first class citizenship”; “full citizenship.” As to details:

(1—Political). Abolition of the poll tax and the white primary for which see hereunder.

(2—Educational). Assistance to the school system, if necessary by the federal government.

(3—Judicial). Fair play in the courts, and a federal antilynching law.

(4—Jobs). FEPC and a decent chance at occupational opportunity.

(5—Enlightenment). Acceptance by whites of the theory that, if Negroes get proper education and jobs, an immense economic improvement for the whole South, white and black alike, will result.

(6—Social). Better housing, better public services, better transportation.

(7—Propaganda). In the words of Mary McLeod Bethune, “government leadership in building favorable public opinion.”

Things are hard for the Negro in the South—yes. They could scarcely be much harder. On the other hand the point might be made that, for the most part, Negroes are better off in America than in any other country in the world, if only because the chance to rise is greater. There is less discrimination in France, true, and no segregation or race prejudice at all in Brazil, but in no other country—despite everything—have most Negroes quite so much potential opportunity as in the United States. Very few American Negroes ever want to leave America. Of course it goes without saying that this should not serve to excuse further ill-treatment of Negroes by the white community.

White on Black

Southern conservatism is a unique phenomenon in western civilization in being married to an established pattern of illegality.

—Gunnar Myrdal

Whites in the South have several attitudes on the Negro problem. At one extreme is the fanatic who shouts, “We’re going to maintain our white supremacy at all costs!” Next comes he who says, “We must maintain white supremacy, but we’re going to be just!” Next, perhaps, is the compromiser who wants to do something for the Negro but who fears to do so, because he may be saddled with the worst epithet the South knows—“nigger lover!” Finally, there are numerous decent Southerners to whom the issue is a permanent excruciating dilemma, who take it wrenchingly to heart, and in whom a fierce struggle of conscience rages. In almost every southern town there is at least one white group earnestly trying to improve things. Then too there are plenty of whites who, on more sentimental grounds, have a genuine deep affection for the Negro. Some envy him. “They can be happy on nothin’! Listen to ’em laugh!”

To most southern whites, segregation is simply considered a matter of decency. It is bred in the bones. A southern child learns about segregation practically as he learns about God and sex. I heard one governor of a state burst out passionately. “The Lord created it—their damned color!” But also I heard one man, by no means a governor, remark, “The blacker they are, the better I like ’em!”—meaning, of course, that such blackness gives additional pretext for discrimination.

A revealing item is the “Eleanor Club” legend. An invisible monsoon swept the South a few years ago; the black kitchen and household help, so the stories flew, were “organizing” in the name of Mrs. Roosevelt, and planned to desert their pots and pans and romp off to work in war industry or, at the minimum, form labor unions of their own. The rumor mongering about these “clubs” was, no doubt, caused partly by fear that Negro servants might strike for better wages. In actual fact, after investigation by various competent authorities, no single “Eleanor Club” has ever been found. The entire business was myth out of the whole cloth.

Lillian Smith²⁴ once asked a number of white citizens a group of questions. The results were various in the extreme:

Question: Do you call Negroes “niggers”?

Answer:

1. “Of course I do—what else is there to call one?”

2. “I have never used the word. No well-bred Southerner would.”

3. “No, I don’t say ‘nigger.’ I say ‘darkie,’ though.”

4. “I call them ‘niggers’ behind their back; never to their face.”

5. “Yeah, by God—and I’ll call them ‘niggers’ till I die.”

Question: Do you mind sitting by a Negro in a street car?

Answers:

1. “No. I prefer to sit by people who don’t have colds; that’s about all I’d ask of a street car.”

2. “I personally don’t mind. But you know you can’t start that kind of thing down in the South.”

3. “If you let a nigger sit where he wants on street cars and buses, next thing you know he’ll be wanting to marry your sister—see?”

Question: Would you call a Negro “Mister”?

Answers:

1. “Certainly. What else could a well-bred person call one?”

2. “Call a nigger ‘Mister’! I’d be————————first.”

3. “I wouldn’t mind doing it. Never have, however.”

Question: What do you think of co-education of the races?

Answers:

1. “My God! ’Scuse me, lady, but you honestly oughtn’t to ask that question round here. Personally, but don’t quote me, I really wouldn’t care.”

2. “Co-education! I don’t think a decent person would discuss it!”

One familiar southern attitude is, “The Negro is our problem. We have to live with it, and let us solve it.” Also Southerners say, “You Northerners didn’t grow up with this thing in your hearts; therefore you can never understand it.” Indeed, interference or advice from the North is tenaciously resented. Yet, no matter what the South may have done of itself, the record would certainly seem to indicate that it is not enough. Another familiar phenomenon is the “vicious circle” attitude. People refuse to give opportunities to a Negro, on the a priori assumption that he cannot make use of them, blaming him the while. The pattern becomes, “We cannot train Negroes for this type of work, since they won’t be able to do it if we train them!”

The most interesting program for amelioration of the whole problem that I heard in the South came from a white professor. It consisted of four clauses: (a) Enforce the law, i.e., prevent illegal discriminations; (b) As to segregation, try to do first things first; (c) Encourage migration to the North, until approximately one-third of the Negroes now in the South have moved; (d) Don’t mistreat Negroes, but don’t baby them either.

Politics, Poll Tax, and White Primaries

On the level of national legislation three dominant issues involving Negroes confront the country, an antilynching bill, FEPC, and a bill to abolish the poll tax.

A federal bill aimed against lynching has passed the House of Representatives several times, but each time it has reached the Senate it has been killed by filibuster. One may well ask how any senator, even Bilbo, can assume a position which seems to favor lynching, but this is not the way it works out. Projected antilynching bills concentrate mostly on the setting up of federal machinery for prosecution, taking this out of the hands of the local state authorities. So of course the southern senators are able to protest that their precious state rights are being infringed, and it is mainly on this ground that they filibuster, and keep any bill from coming to an actual vote.

As to legislation to make the FEPC permanent, it is moribund on the national plane, though in several states (notably New York and Massachusetts) local organizations are working well. In Washington the proposal remains hopelessly bottled up in committee, and it can be resuscitated in the 80th Congress only by reintroduction of the measure and beginning all over. The Fair Employment Practice Committee has a curious history. Early in 1941, when anti-Negro discrimination in national defense industries was becoming more and more severe, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and one of the most controversial of modern Negro leaders, threatened to organize a “March on Washington” in protest. Mr. Roosevelt as a result called a white-black conference of industrial and labor leaders and government officials, and issued an executive order which formally “abolished” discriminatory practices in industry and government departments. This was, incidentally, the first executive order by a president having to do with Negroes since the Emancipation Proclamation. Subsequently the FEPC was set up to enforce the order and superintend its application. But it never got anything like the appropriations it needed, and the southern senators sniped at it and chivvied it unmercifully. Finally, after the war, a bill to extend the act was beaten by filibuster. Anybody who wants to undergo the distressing experience of learning what southern conservatives really think can do no better than read the Congressional Record containing the accounts of this gruesome debate, which held up all other Senate business for eighteen entire days early in 1946.

The poll tax is a whole long story in itself. A bill to abolish the poll tax by federal authority has passed the House three times, but each time the Senate killed it, again by filibustering. It is extremely striking that none of these three major proposals for ameliorative legislation—antilynching, FEPC, and poll tax—has ever actually reached a full vote in the Senate; the Bilbos and their like have always managed to squash them before they reach the voting stage.

A “poll tax” is an annual tax imposed as a prerequisite for voting. Seven states still retain it—Arkansas, Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, Virginia, Texas, and Tennessee, though in Tennessee it only remains in force by virtue of some of the choicest legal skulduggery ever known. The amount of the tax differs state by state, and in some it is retroactive; for instance in Alabama, though the annual tax is only $1.50, it may cost as much as $36.00 to vote if a man has failed to pay over a long period. The highest annual tax ($2.00) is in the poorest state, Mississippi. Now, to a comfortably well-off Northerner, these sums may seem small. But they can mean a good deal to a sharecropper who earns $20.00 a month and whose children have no shoes. Moreover other factors make the payment a nuisance. In some states no notice is sent out; the initiative rests with the voter, and often he is too ignorant to pay. In some the tax is lumped with other taxes, and the citizen may not even know that he has paid it. Also, as a rule, it must be paid well in advance, and very few of the Negro underpossessed or poor whites pay anything ahead of time. Finally, many Negroes hesitate to pay because this puts them on the general tax rolls, and may make them subject to other levies.

What this system serves to produce is, of course, disproportionate representation and a limited electorate. At least ten million potential voters are disfranchised in the South as a whole;²⁵ to take a specific example, Mississippi has about 1,250,000 people of voting age, but in the last elections only 180,000 went to the polls. In other words Bilbo was elected by less than one-sixth of the electorate. As another example, Walter F. George was elected senator in 1944 by 14 per cent of the total potential Georgia vote, or less than 8 per cent of the people of the state; similar figures for Ellender of Louisiana are 6 and 3 per cent.

Most politicians love the poll tax. For one thing it leads to a small, easily influenced electorate. A machine may take its choice: (a) assume that the tax will keep enough people from the polls, or (b) simply “buy the vote,” that is, pay the tax for a bloc of voters big enough to decide an election. For years, this latter practice was a favorite method in Tennessee. Negroes by the thousand (with poll tax duly paid by somebody else) were herded into busses and hauled wholesale to the voting booths. In South Carolina recently 25,000 poll taxes “were put up,” as the phrase is, at the last moment to decide an election that seemed uncertain. This was the election where a Negro candidate, Osceola McKaine, ran for the Senate under the aegis of the “Progressive Democratic Party” and actually won about 12,000 votes.

Also the poll tax increases the power of the South in Congress. Take South Carolina. It has 989,841 citizens over twenty-one, of whom only 99,830 voted in 1944. But South Carolina has precise equality of representation in the House—six seats—with the state of Washington, with 793,833 voters out of a total voting population of 1,123,725! Similarly Georgia gets ten seats for 312,539 votes; Wisconsin gets ten for 1,941,603.²⁶

Finally consider the political morality of all this. Plenty of good Southerners hate the poll tax hotly, if only because they sincerely think that it is sinful, under democracy, to make people pay for the privilege of voting. What the poll tax really means, in the words of Jennings Perry, is that “the majority of people in seven states have no voice in government.”

Of course the white supremacy addicts, on their side, defend the poll tax with great vigor. If, conceivably, Congress should ever abolish it, they will retaliate promptly by imposing a literacy tax as a substitute. They must, at all costs, continue to prevent the Negro from voting, because once he is in a position to exert full voting power, he will in time vote white supremacy out. There is, however, one interesting qualification to this. If any local movement to get rid of the poll tax seems on the point of winning, as in North Carolina in the 20’s, Florida in the 30’s and Georgia in the 40’s, the professional politicians join the movement with alacrity, because they cannot risk facing a free electorate with a record of having just voted against a free electorate.

The poll tax disfranchises whites too; in fact, it actually prevents more whites—about six million in all—from voting than it does Negroes, which is a striking commentary on the poverty of whites in the South too.

Another device severely limiting the vote in several southern states is the residence requirement. Numerous tenant farmers move every year, which means that many, even if they have paid their poll tax, never get a chance to vote. In Alabama, for instance, a voter must be a resident of the state for two years, of the county for one year, and of the actual district for three months.

Finally consider the white primary. This is an instrument even more decisive than the poll tax in depriving Negroes of the vote, and it still exists in South Carolina, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana; in Florida (and parts of Texas and Alabama) it is breaking down; it no longer exists in North Carolina or Tennessee. The white primary is not so much a matter of statute as of party regulation. To exclude Negroes from general elections, on the ground of race, would of course be unconstitutional. But it is the primaries that decide all elections in the South, and so, if Negroes can be excluded from these, they are duly cut off from effective suffrage. This is easily done if the local Democratic party passes bylaws, say, eliminating Negroes from party membership or privileges. Lately, however, in the celebrated Texas case the Supreme Court of the United States has decided that such strictures by the local party are illegal. Consequently various southern states are, at the moment, trying to work out new legal artifices to keep the primaries white and “pure.” They have not been too successful. More Negroes voted in 1944 and 1946 than at any other time in history.²⁷

Except vestigially in South Carolina, no movement toward a Negro political party exists in the United States. That this should be so is a perpetual puzzle to non-Americans. They wonder why, since the Negro is so manifestly discriminated against, he does not rise in the classic American manner and express his dissatisfaction in perfectly legal but overt political terms. This has never happened. There is no “Negro party” for the simplest of reasons. Such a party would have no real cohesion except in the South, and it would almost certainly defeat its own putative end by formally putting the race issue into politics and so arousing the united white South to intensified opposition. I have yet to meet a responsible Negro, southern or northern, who wants a black party, any more than I have ever met anyone who wanted a “California” party or a “South Dakota” party. The future of Negro politics lies within the existing parties, and shrewd Negroes know well how these may be played against one another.

This is not to say that Negroes do not have substantial political power. They do, though in the South, under a one-party system, they cannot easily influence results. But in the North, according to such a sober authority as Walter White, Negroes hold the balance of power in no fewer than seventeen states, with a total of 281 electoral votes (and to elect a president only 266 are necessary). What Mr. White means is that in a hotly contested state where a few heavily industrialized precincts may tip the scales one way or the other, the Negroes may be able to do this, exactly as can the Poles in Buffalo or the Czechs in Pittsburgh.²⁸

One point that good white politicians keep in mind is Negro sensitiveness. With what avidity Negroes leap to support a leader who tells them nice things! Any white who really does something for Negroes (Roosevelt) or promises them something (Willkie) can overnight build up a landslide vote.

What the Future Holds

The haughty American nation … makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the … inferiority of the Negro by the fact that he is a bootblack.

—Bernard Shaw

Now in conclusion let us say with emphasis that, in spite of everything, a slow but progressive steady amelioration of the Negro problem is a fact. The social upheavals and new distributions of peoples caused by the war (for instance during the war a million Negroes worked side by side with whites all over the nation); the greater awareness by Negroes of their own rights; the pace of urbanization in the South; bad conscience among many whites; the findings of modern science which dissipate the racial myth; the Negroes’ own achievement in various fields—all this makes a leaven, a yeast, which contributes to progress and reform.

Forty years ago when President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House the event was a national scandal. No such scandal would arise today from a similar incident. As a matter of fact Booker T. Washington became in 1940 the first Negro ever elected to the Hall of Fame. Atrocious things still happen, but that there has been some measure of advance can hardly be denied. Recently two Negro judges became members of the American Bar Association, and the American College of Surgeons in 1946 broke a famous barrier by electing eight Negroes to its membership. For the first time in history Baptist ministers, Negro and white, met in Georgia recently for a joint session. Jackie Robinson, a Negro shortstop, became in 1945 the first Negro in organized baseball, and the Supreme Court ruled in June, 1946, in what is known as the Irene Morgan case, that passenger busses engaged in interstate travel have no right to enforce Jim Crow restrictions. A Negro girl presided not long ago over a mixed meeting at the University of North Carolina, the first time this has ever happened, and in Tennessee the American Veterans Committee voted in favor of mixed chapters.

Amelioration does not mean solution. The Negro problem is nowhere near being “solved.” To solve it will take generations, if only because, as Myrdal says, it is indissolubly part of all other American problems, part of a universal evolution in “social self-healing.”

One thing, it would seem, is certain. The days of treating Negroes like sheep are done with. They cannot be maintained indefinitely in a submerged position, because they themselves are now strong enough to contest this position, because the overwhelming bulk of white Americans are, in the last analysis, decent minded, and because of education. It is impossible at this stage to halt education among Negroes. But the more you educate, the more you make inevitable a closer participation by Negroes in American life as a whole. In slightly different terms, this is the problem that the British Empire has faced in various colonial areas; once mass education gets under way the route to freedom becomes open, and the more you educate, the more impossible it becomes to block this road. The United States must either terminate education among Negroes, an impossibility, or prepare to accept the eventual consequences, that is, Negro equality under democracy.

There will never be a “solution” of the Negro problem satisfactory to everybody. But improvements, no matter how fitful, must continue if American democracy itself is to survive. Discrimination not only contaminates the Negro community; it contaminates the white as well. There were people in the Middle Ages who thought that the bubonic plague would not spread to their own precious selves. But there is no immunity to certain types of disease. A cancer will destroy a body, unless cured.

¹ The reader who chances to pick up this book at this point is asked to glance first at the chapter preceding. Also there are passages about the Negro in Chapters 18 and 33 above, as well as briefer mention in 3, 22, and 37, and some additional material in 45, 46, and 49. As to the present chapter, almost every sentence could be expanded into a page. To compress into a chapter any attempt to describe the Negro in the South is like trying to squeeze a sponge into a matchbox.

² Some southern business firms are, however, coming to use “Mister” in letters to Negroes. This is partly because the big mail order houses in the North pay no attention to the ban on honorifics and so are getting much Negro business. Cf Brogan, U.S.A. p. 22.

³ But some Negro drivers also refuse Negro passengers.

⁴ Lillian Smith, These Are the Things to Do, p. 5.

⁵ In The Souls of Black Folk, p. 185.

⁶ Walter Winchell, New York Daily Mirror, March 26, 1945.

⁷ Written with the assistance of Richard Sterner and Arnold Rose, and published by Harper & Brothers, New York, 1944. The work was made possible by a grant of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

⁸ A point in an allied realm is that Mound Bayou, Mississippi, one of the few all-Negro towns in the United States, is also one of the few with no jail. Dabney, op. cit. p. 196.

⁹ From American Notes, p. 245 et seq.

¹⁰ Quotations from the New York Times, August 15, 1946.

¹¹ New York Times, October 24, 1946.

¹² New York Times, August 11, 1946.

¹³ Time, March 11, 1946.

¹⁴ Article by Cabell Phillips, August 3, 1946.

¹⁵ “The Caucasian Problem,” in What the Negro Wants, a symposium edited by Rayford W. Logan, University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Reprinted by permission.

¹⁶ See Chapter 46.

¹⁷ During Reconstruction the Negroes were a majority in three states. Some communities had black “control.” Out of the excesses then practiced by carpetbaggers and others, as mentioned in the preceding chapter, came the chief rationalizations whereby the South excuses itself today for lack of progress. It is only fair to state that a “revisionist” school of historians differs sharply from its predecessors in this matter. They assert that professional Southerners have violently exaggerated the outrages of Reconstruction.

¹⁸ According to George S. Schuyler in “The Caucasian Problem,” cited above, p. 290.

¹⁹ What the Negro Wants, p. 66.

²⁰ In South Today, Winter 1942–43.

²¹ Of course, as Langston Hughes once pointed out, millions of northern Negroes manage to go to the polls without cohabiting with white women.

²² Sketch of Walter White, in Thirteen Against the Odds, p. 87.

²³ To say nothing of coon, jig, dinge, Sambo, shine, crow, smoke, boogie, ape, jazzbo, jigaboo, moke, kinky head, spade, eight ball, Zulu, skunk, and seal. Cf. Myrdal, II, 958, and an essay by H. L. Mencken, “Designations for Colored Folk,” American Speech, October, 1944. One term I heard often is “nigra.” This is a compromise used by whites who don’t like either “Negro” or “nigger.”

²⁴ South Today, Winter 1942–43.

²⁵ Cf. The Southern Frontier, January, 1945. Figures on George and Ellender are from PM, January 23, 1946.

²⁶ What the Negro Wants, op. cit., p. IS8.

²⁷ Such artifices as the white primary are by no means new. For years, until the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1915, most southern states restricted Negro voting by use of the “grandfather clause.” This kept from the polls all Negroes whose grandfathers were not American citizens—which meant automatic exclusion of the vast majority who were descendants of slaves at the time of emancipation.

²⁸ Myrdal, with his customary thorough sagacity, takes issue with Mr. White on this point (II, 1330), saying that the seventeen-state estimate “is based on the dubious assumption that all Negroes of voting age do vote, that the Negro vote is perfectly organized and flexible, that white voters are always divided closely … and that white voters would be uninfluenced if an organized Negro movement were afoot.” On the other hand one should never underestimate the extreme vulnerability of the American political system to minorities of all kinds. In November, 1946, for instance, it seemed for a time that control of the Senate would rest on the electoral outcome in the single state of Nevada, with a population of 110,000 out of 138,000,000.