The New Negro Quotes

The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, -- this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost... He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American...

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?

To have built up a new organization, which was not purely political, among Negroes in America was a wonderful feat, for the Negro politician does not allow any other kind of organization within his race to thrive.

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word 'beat' spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction--We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer--It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization--the subterraneans heroes who'd finally turned from the 'freedom' machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the 'derangement of the senses,' talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought), a new incantation--The same thing was almost going on in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and what's more we knew about it--But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds--We'd stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie Jackson, Lennie Tristano and all the rest, talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets- -We'd write stories about some strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other coasts, other cities, like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an invisible First Crusade- -We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung novels about them, erected long poems celebrating the new 'angels' of the American underground--In actuality there was only a handful of real hip swinging cats and what there was vanished mightily swiftly during the Korean War when (and after) a sinister new kind of efficiency appeared in America, maybe it was the result of the universalization of Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet's 'peace' officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number.

She's got those big black eyes with plenty shiny white in them that makes them shine like brand new money and she knows what God gave women eyelashes for, too. Her hair is not what you might call straight. It's negro hair, but it's got a kind of white flavor. Like the piece of string out of a ham. It's not ham at all, but it's been around ham and got the flavor.

It is well known that the black race is the most oppressed and most exploited of the human family. It is well known that the spread of capitalism and the discovery of the New World had as an immediate result the rebirth of slavery which was, for centuries, a scourge for the Negroes and a bitter disgrace for mankind. What everyone does not perhaps know, is that after sixty-five years of so-called emancipation, American Negroes still endure atrocious moral and material sufferings, of which the most cruel and horrible is the custom of lynching.

After World War I, dozens of Negro soldiers had been lynched in the South, some of them still wearing their uniforms, and in the summer of 1946 the lynchings of black veterans resumed with a vengeance.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. No road whatever will lead Americans back to the simplicity of this European village where white men still have the luxury of looking on me as a stranger. I am not, really, a stranger any longer for any American alive. One of the things that distinguishes Americans from other people is that no other people has ever been so deeply involved in the lives of black men, and vice versa. This fact faced, with all its implications, it can be seen that the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. It is precisely this black-white experience which may prove of indispensable value to us in the world we face today. This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

New York! I say New York, let black blood flow into your blood. Let it wash the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life Let it give your bridges the curve of hips and supple vines. Now the ancient age returns, unity is restored, The recociliation of the Lion and Bull and Tree Idea links to action, the ear to the heart, sign to meaning. See your rivers stirring with musk alligators And sea cows with mirage eyes. No need to invent the Sirens. Just open your eyes to the April rainbow And your eyes, especially your ears, to God Who in one burst of saxophone laughter Created heaven and earth in six days, And on the seventh slept a deep Negro sleep.

The workman cut to the left, still laying on his horn, and roared around the drunkenly weaving limousine. He invited the driver of the limo to perform an illegal sex act on himself. To engage in oral congress with various rodents and birds. He articulated his own proposal that all persons of Negro blood return to their native continent. He expressed his sincere belief in the position the limo driver's soul would occupy in the afterlife. He finished by saying that he believed he had met the limodriver's mother in a New Orleans house of prostitution.

...we're a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We're destroying the great lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we've begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison into our children's bones, and we knew it. We've made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to pursued our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we're used to it.

The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.

Why do they [Americans] quarrel, why do they hate Negroes, Indians, even Germans, why do they not have science and poetry commensurate with themselves, why are there so many frauds and so much nonsense? I cannot soon give a solution to these questions ... It was clear that in the United States there was a development not of the best, but of the middle and worst sides of European civilization; the notorious general voting, the tendency to politics... all the same as in Europe. A new dawn is not to be seen on this side of the ocean.

MORE SHIPS LEFT NEW YORK CITY until the final day of the British occupation. On November 30, 1783, I was rowed out to the George III, inspected for the Book of Negroes by men who did not know me, and allowed to leave the Thirteen Colonies. I knew that it would be called the United States. But I refused to speak that name. There was nothing united about a nation that said all men were created equal, but that kept my people in chains.

I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.

In short, the Negroes’ problem cannot be solved unless the whole of American society takes a new turn toward greater economic justice.

For generations the status quo has been based on violence, with the Negro as victim. A few whites have managed to be liberal without feeling a direct threat to their social position. Now, as the Negroes reach the stage where they make specific, if minimum, demands, a new and revolutionary situation has developed. There is little middle ground on which to maneuver and few compromises that are possible. For the first time, the white liberals are forced to stand for racial justice or to repudiate the liberal principles which they have always wanted to believe in.

But, back of this, still broods silently the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and are seeking in the great night a new religious ideal. Some day the Awakening will come, when the pent-up vigor of 10,000,000 souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living - Liberty, Justice and Right - is marked "For White People Only".

Art and science were in German hands. Apart from the new artistic trash, which might easily have been produced by a negro tribe, all genuine artistic inspiration came from the German section of the population.

In the U.S. election of 1860, the New York Herald's owner James Gordon Bennett Sr. warned the white workers of New York, "... if Lincoln is elected, you will have to compete with the labor of four million emancipated negroes.

We also skipped over who the “Nephilim” were, who Melchizedek was in the bible and what the “Father’s” name is in the Old Testament/New Testament.   Bible Class teachers would also have nothing to say about Genesis 1:26 when it says “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:” The word “us” and “our” meant more than one person.  

The path to the ethnic democratization of American society is through its culture, that is to say through its cultural apparatus, which comprises the eyes, the ears, and the "mind" of capitalism and is twentieth-century voice to the world. Thus to democratize the cultural apparatus is tantamount to revolutionizing American society itself into the living realization of its professed ideas. Seeing the problem in another way, to revolutionize the cultural apparatus is to deal fundamentally with the unsolved American question of nationality--Which group speaks for America and for the glorification of which ethnic image? Either all group images speak for themselves and for the nation, or American nationality will never be determined.

In America, the materio-economic conditions relate to a societal, multi-group existence in a way never before know in world history. American Negro nationalism can never create its own values, find its revolutionary significance, define its political and economic goals, until Negro intellectuals take up the cudgels against the cultural imperialism practiced in all of its manifold ramifications on the Negro within American culture. But this kind of revolution would have to be predicated on the recognition that the cultural and artistic originality of the American nation is founded, historically, on the ingredients of a black aesthetic and artistic base.

A fear of cosmic indifference seemed comical, or downright naive....Beyond them he saw the police forces at the barricade as they muscled the crowd of Negroes back; he saw the decaying facade of his tenement with new eyes; he saw the patrol cars parked in the middle of the road like three great black hounds waiting to pounce on all these gathered sheep. What was indifference compared to malice?

The other was that all the major civil rights organizations, new as well as old, were committed to the philosophy of non-violence, the doctrine preached by the most conspicuous leader in the Negro movement, Martin Luther King. ‘We will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer,’ he told the whites, ‘and in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.

Those were wonderful days, Doc’s childhood, full of strong men whose handshake was their bond and women who knew how to cook and raise children. Nice, clean families. This was before the “new people”—the Jews, the Negroes, the Greeks, the Mennonites, the Russian Orthodox—arrived.

To be sure, rock n' roll is usually a flagrant commercialization of rhythm & blues, but the music in many cases depends on materials that are so alien to the general middle-class, middle-brow American culture as to remain interesting. Many of the same kinds of cheap American dilutions that had disfigured popular swing have tended to disfigure the new music, but the source, the exciting and "vulgar" urban blues of the forties, is still sufficiently removed from the mainstream to be vital. For this reason, rock n' roll has not become as emotionally meaningless as commercial swing. It is sill raw enough to stand the dilution and in some cases, to even be made attractive by the very fact of its commercialization. Even its "alienation" remains conspicuous; it is often used to characterize white adolescents as "youthful offenders." (Rock n' roll also is popular with another "underprivileged" minority, e.g., Puerto Rican youths. There are now even quite popular rock n' roll songs, at least around New York, that have some of the lyrics in Spanish.) Rock n' roll is the blues form of the classes of Americans who lack the "sophistication" to be middle brows, or are too naïve to get in on the mainstream American taste; those who think that somehow Melachrino, Kostelanetz, etc., are too lifeless

He invited the driver of the limo to perform an illegal sex act on himself. To engage in oral congress with various rodents and birds. He articulated his own proposal that all persons of Negro blood return to their native continent. He expressed his sincere belief in the position the limo driver’s soul would occupy in the afterlife. He finished by saying that he believed he had met the limodriver’s mother in a New Orleans house of prostitution.

Frederick Douglass, of sainted memory, once, in addressing his race, used these words: "We are to prove that we can better our own condition. One way to do this is to accumulate property. This may sound to you like a new gospel. You have been accustomed to hear that money is the root of all evil, etc. On the other hand, property—money, if you please—will purchase for us the only condition by which any people can rise to the dignity of genuine manhood; for without property there can be no leisure, without leisure there can be no thought, without thought there can be no invention, without invention there can be no progress.

He was like some prophet of old, scourging the sins of the people. He leaped about in a frenzy of inspiration till I feared he would do himself an injury. Sometimes he expressed himself in a somewhat odd manner, but every word carried conviction. He showed me New York in its true colours. He showed me the vanity and wickedness of sitting in gilded haunts of vice, eating lobster when decent people should be in bed. 'He said that the tango and the fox-trot were devices of the devil to drag people down into the Bottomless Pit. He said that there was more sin in ten minutes with a negro banjo orchestra than in all the ancient revels of Nineveh and Babylon. And when he stood on one leg and pointed right at where I was sitting and shouted "This means you!" I could have sunk through the floor.

The time has come to realize that the interracial drama acted out on the American continent has not only created a new black man, it has created a new white man, too. . .the history of the American Negro problem is not merely shameful, it is also something of an achievement. For even when the worst has been said, it must also be added that the perpetual challenge posed by this problem was always, somehow, perpetually met. . . This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.

I learned in New Jersey that to be a Negro meant, precisely, that one was never looked at but was simply at the mercy of the reflexes the color of one’s skin caused in other people…That year in New Jersey lives in my mind as though it were the year during which, having an unsuspected predilection for it, I first contracted some dread, chronic disease, the unfailing symptom of which is a kind of blind fever, a pounding in the skull and fire in the bowels…There is not a Negro alive who does not have this rage in his blood–one has the choice, merely, of living with it consciously or surrendering to it. As for me, this fever has recurred in me, and does, and will until the day I die.

Negro poverty is not white poverty…. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice and present prejudice. They are anguishing to observe. For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced, and they must be dealt with, and they must be overcome; if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin.

The white liberal must rid himself of the notion that there can be a tensionless transition from the old order of injustice to the new order of justice. Two things are clear to me, and I hope they are clear to white liberals. One is that the Negro cannot achieve emancipation through violent rebellion. The other is that the Negro cannot achieve emancipation by passively waiting for the white race voluntarily to grant it to him. The Negro has not gained a single right in America without persistent pressure and agitation. However lamentable it may seem, the Negro is now convinced that white America will never admit him to equal rights unless it is coerced into doing it. Nonviolent coercion always brings tension to the surface. This tension, however, must not be seen as destructive. There is a kind of tension that is both healthy and necessary for growth. Society needs nonviolent gadflies to bring its tensions into the open and force its citizens to confront the ugliness of their prejudices and the tragedy of their racism. It is important for the liberal to see that the oppressed person who agitates for his rights is not the creator of tension. He merely brings out the hidden tension that is already alive.

I have said that there is no "average" American. That is due to the circumstance that the people of the United States differ from each as widely as the parts they live in. The New Yorker is a different specimen of man from the Westerner; the latter is entirely different again from the people of Texas. The Middle West, such States for instance as Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska or Iowa, have an entirely different psychology from that of Florida or Lower California. Their habits of life, their modes of thought, even their language is different. Still further, it must also be considered that millions of foreigners and descendants of foreign born people live in the United States and are part of the entire population that is known as "American". Add to this more than 10 million negroes, not to mention the score of different Indian (red-skin) tribes, who are the real, indigenous Americans. In this conglomeration of races it is impossible to speak of the "average" American, nor can any adequate estimate of American psychology be made on such a basis.

These new black arrivals “with little education” were “resented by the small group of law-abiding and self-sustaining Negroes” already living in Portland.

Will's voice draws me back. 'I'm excited for Miss Fauset to be with us at this propitious time, Mrs. Fauset. The war is over, the world is changing, and we not only need to be part of that change, but must also facilitate that change. This is the time for the new Negro, and literature must play its role. At its best, literature is a useful form of propaganda.

You give me this advantage: that whereas you have never had to look at me, because you’ve sealed me away along with sin and hell and death and all the other things you didn’t want to look at, including love, my life was in your hands, and I had to look at you. I know more about you, therefore, than you know about me. I’ve had to spend my life, after all—and all the other Negroes in the country have had to spend their lives—outwitting and watching white people. I had to know what you were doing before you did it. People talk about the new Negro, but he’s been coming for three hundred years. The country thinks he’s new because they’ve never had to look at him before. And they are looking at him now, not because there’s been a change of heart, but only because they must.

What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro;

Indeed, by the end of a turbulent decade there was a new quality to Negro life. The Negro was no longer a subject of change; he was the active organ of change. He powered the drive. He set the pace.

For all of our enormous geographic range, for all of our sectionalism, for all of our interwoven breeds drawn from every part of the ethnic world, we are a nation, a new breed. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners. And descendants of English, Irish, Italian, Jewish, German, Polish are essentially American. This is not patriotic whoop-de-do; it is carefully observed fact. California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, and Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart. And this is the more remarkable because it has happened so quickly. It is a fact that Americans from all sections and of all racial extractions are more alike than the Welsh are like the English, the Lancashireman like the Cockney, or for that matter the Lowland Scot like the Highlander. It is astonishing that this has happened in less than two hundred years and most of it in the last fifty. The American identity is an exact and provable thing.

Du Bois became known as one of those “half dozen Negroes” who had allowed Harvard “to make a man out of semi-beast,” as New Yorker Franklin Delano Roosevelt exulted as a Harvard freshman in 1903.15 Though

By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system, and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited his condition then better than the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave masters early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain bounds. The long system of repression and degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of the beautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world, under sorrow and tribulation until the Great Day when He should lead His dark children home,—this became his comforting dream.

When I think of New York City, I think of all the girls, the Jewish girls, the Italian girls, the Irish, Polack, Chinese, German, Negro, Spanish, Russian girls, all on parade in the city. I don't know whether it's something special with me or whether every man in the city walks around with the same feeling inside him, but I feel as though I'm at a picnic in this city. I like to sit near the women in the theaters, the famous beauties who've taken six hours to get ready and look it. And the young girls at the football games, with the red cheeks, and when the warm weather comes, the girls in their summer dresses . . .

I remember the first time I ever saw you, the day you came. L.J. and I were so excited about this new person that came into the family like a storm blowing over the Bradshaw’s. We’d never seen a Negro before.

The New Negro anthology by Locke in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was officially launched for the white educated elite to see. Negro writers would liberate the race, at long last, from the demons of Redemption through art and culture, as Victoria Matthews had suggested some thirty years before. There was only one small problem with this: No people, in all of human history, has ever been liberated by the creation of art. None.

With the gun which was too big for him, the breech-loader which did not even belong to him but to Major de Spain and which he had fired only once, at a stump on the first day to learn the recoil and how to reload it with the paper shells, he stood against a big gum tree beside a little bayou whose black still water crept without motion out of a cane-brake, across a small clearing and into the cane again, where, invisible, a bird, the big woodpecker called Lord-to-God by negroes, clattered at a dead trunk. It was a stand like any other stand, dissimilar only in incidentals to the one where he had stood each morning for two weeks; a territory new to him yet no less familiar than that other one which after two weeks he had come to believe he knew a little--the same solitude, the same loneliness through which frail and timorous man had merely passed without altering it, leaving no mark nor scar, which looked exactly as it must have looked when the first ancestor of Sam fathers' Chickasaw predecessors crept into it and looked about him, club or stone axe or bone arrow drawn and ready, different only because, squatting at the edge of the kitchen, he had smelled the dogs huddled and cringing beneath it and saw the raked ear and side of the bitch that, as Sam had said, had to be brave once in order to keep on calling herself a dog, and saw yesterday in the earth beside the gutted log, the print of the living foot. He heard no dogs at all. He never did certainly hear them. He only heard the drumming of the woodpecker stop short off, and knew that the bear was looking at him. he did not move, holding the useless gun which he knew now he would never fire at it, now or ever, tasting in his saliva that taint of brass which he had smelled in the huddled dogs when he peered under the kitchen.

Back there, before Jim Crow, before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them, the Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures. Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together.3 —Lerone Bennett Jr.

As soon as the Negro comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently, when he gives birth to hope and forces back the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds more clearly and his voice less hoarsely. The new fashions in jazz are not simply born of economic competition. We must without any doubt see in them one of the consequences of the defeat, slow but sure, of the southern world of the United States.

Although Gene was white there was something of the wise and tired old Negro in him, and something very much like Elmer Hassel, the New York dope addict, in him, but a railroad Hassel, a traveling epic Hassel, crossing and recrossing the country every year, south in the winter and north in the summer, and only because he had no place he could stay in without getting tired of it and because there was nowhere to go but everywhere, keep rolling under the stars, generally the Western stars.

Before Emmett Till’s murder, I had known the fear of hunger, hell, and the Devil. But now there was a new fear known to me—the fear of being killed just because I was black. This was the worst of my fears. I knew once I got food, the fear of starving to death would leave. I also was told that if I were a good girl, I wouldn’t have to fear the Devil or hell. But I didn’t know what one had to do or not do as a Negro not to be killed. Probably just being a Negro period was enough, I thought.

In the early months of World War II, San Francisco's Fill-more district, or the Western Addition, experienced a visible revolution. On the surface it appeared to be totally peaceful and almost a refutation of the term “revolution.” The Yakamoto Sea Food Market quietly became Sammy's Shoe Shine Parlor and Smoke Shop. Yashigira's Hardware metamorphosed into La Salon de Beauté owned by Miss Clorinda Jackson. The Japanese shops which sold products to Nisei customers were taken over by enterprising Negro businessmen, and in less than a year became permanent homes away from home for the newly arrived Southern Blacks. Where the odors of tempura, raw fish and cha had dominated, the aroma of chitlings, greens and ham hocks now prevailed. The Asian population dwindled before my eyes. I was unable to tell the Japanese from the Chinese and as yet found no real difference in the national origin of such sounds as Ching and Chan or Moto and Kano. As the Japanese disappeared, soundlessly and without protest, the Negroes entered with their loud jukeboxes, their just-released animosities and the relief of escape from Southern bonds. The Japanese area became San Francisco's Harlem in a matter of months. A person unaware of all the factors that make up oppression might have expected sympathy or even support from the Negro newcomers for the dislodged Japanese. Especially in view of the fact that they (the Blacks) had themselves undergone concentration-camp living for centuries in slavery's plantations and later in sharecroppers' cabins. But the sensations of common relationship were missing. The Black newcomer had been recruited on the desiccated farm lands of Georgia and Mississippi by war-plant labor scouts. The chance to live in two-or three-story apartment buildings (which became instant slums), and to earn two-and even three-figured weekly checks, was blinding. For the first time he could think of himself as a Boss, a Spender. He was able to pay other people to work for him, i.e. the dry cleaners, taxi drivers, waitresses, etc. The shipyards and ammunition plants brought to booming life by the war let him know that he was needed and even appreciated. A completely alien yet very pleasant position for him to experience. Who could expect this man to share his new and dizzying importance with concern for a race that he had never known to exist? Another reason for his indifference to the Japanese removal was more subtle but was more profoundly felt. The Japanese were not whitefolks. Their eyes, language and customs belied the white skin and proved to their dark successors that since they didn't have to be feared, neither did they have to be considered. All this was decided unconsciously.

What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his. And the Negro recognizes this, in a negative way. Hence the question: Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?

What it comes to is that if we, who can scarcely be considered a white nation, persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay, whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements, and transform them. The price of this transformation is the unconditional freedom of the Negro; it is not too much to say that he, who has been so long rejected, must now be embraced, and at no matter what psychic or social risk.

But Little Grandmother did not keep in touch with her namesake, my mother, Margaret Morris. News about Will Morris's younger daughter reached the "white" side through Mamie. They knew where she was, what she was doing, and who she was doing it with. Most important, they knew she had chosen to stay negro. It is still a matter of speculation as to why my mother's father or one of her much older brothers or her sister did not keep in touch with her and her younger brother. Over the years, Aunt Mamie and my mother's various guardians supplied different explanations. The times were hard. They were bad for mulattoes and worse for "real" Negroes. There was little money around. Her father drank, drifted and could not keep jobs. Her teenage siblings could barely keep jobs ...... She was too dark, revealing both the Negro and swarthy Italian strains of her ancestry. Her color would give them away in their new white settings. All of these reasons were plausible. None of them sufficed. None could take away the pain, the anger, the isolation, the questions.

Yet I was appalled. For at the same time, such a violent act, even though well provoked and not entirely unheard of, was rare and shocking enough so as to make it likely that an atmosphere of suspicion would close in upon Negroes in general. The gossip would get started: God durned niggers gittin’ so they hit back. I was deeply afraid that with such feelings prevalent, our Negroes would become unsettled by the overall mistrust and lose heart for the venture or—even worse—would under this new pressure somehow give away our great secret.

Within two minutes, or even less, he had forgotten all his troubles. Not because his troubles were one whit less heavy and bitter to him than a man's are to a man, but because a new and powerful interest bore them down and drove them out of his mind for the time—just as men's misfortunes are forgotten in the excitement of new enterprises. This new interest was a valued novelty in whistling, which he had just acquired from a negro, and he was suffering to practise it un-disturbed. It consisted in a peculiar bird-like turn, a sort of liquid warble, produced by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth at short intervals in the midst of the music—the reader probably remembers how to do it, if he has ever been a boy. Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet—no doubt, as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer. The summer evenings were long. It was not dark, yet. Presently Tom checked his whistle. A stranger was before him—a boy a shade larger than himself. A new-comer of any age or either sex was an im-pressive curiosity in the poor little shabby village of St. Petersburg. This boy was well dressed, too—well

The man subjected him to a never-seen-a-Negro-like-you-before look, not a novel experience for Carney. He reckoned it occurred more frequently these days, all over. Lunch counters, the voting booth, next thing you know they're running successful furniture businesses in Harlem.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers I've known rivers: I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it. I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all golden in the sunset. I've known rivers: Ancient, dusky rivers. My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

After the opposition had failed to negotiate us into a compromise, it turned to subtler means for blocking the protest; namely, to conquer by dividing. False rumors were spread concerning the leaders of the movement. Negro workers were told by their white employers that their leaders were only concerned with making money out of the movement. Others were told that the Negro leaders rode big cars while they walked. During this period the rumor was spread that I had purchased a brand new Cadillac for myself and a Buick station wagon for my wife. Of course none of this was true.

Then he placed his hands in his pockets and stood in the middle of the street alone, giving the silent roaring rage inside him time to ease down and out, and after several long minutes he once again became who he was, a solitary middle-aged man in the August of life looking for a few more Aprils, an aging bachelor in a floppy suit standing on a tired, worn Brooklyn street in the shadow of a giant housing project built by a Jewish reformer named Robert Moses who forgot he was a reformer, building projects like this all over, which destroyed neighborhoods, chasing out the working Italians, Irish, and Jews, gutting all the pretty things from them, displacing them with Negroes and Spanish and other desperate souls clambering to climb into the attic of New York life, hoping that the bedroom and kitchen below would open up so they could drop in, and at minimum join the club that to them included this man, an overweight bachelor in an ill-fitting suit, watching a shiny car roaring away, the car driven by a handsome young man who was pretty and drove away as if he were barreling into a bright future, while the dowdy heavyset man watched him jealously, believing the man so pretty and handsome had places to go and women to meet and things to do, and the older heavyset man standing behind eating his fumes on a sorry, dreary, crowded old Brooklyn street of storefronts and tired brownstones had nothing left but the fumes of the pretty sports car in his face.

Nine Southern states adopted vagrancy laws - which essentially made it a criminal offense not to work and were applied selectively to blacks - and eight of those states enacted convict laws allowing for the hiring-out of county prisoners to plantation owners and private companies. Prisoners were forced to work for little or no pay. One vagrancy act specifically provided that 'all free negroes and mulattoes over the age of eighteen' must have written proof of a job at the beginning of the year. Those found with no lawful employment were deemed vagrants and convicted. Clearly, the purpose of the black codes in general and the vagrancy laws in particular was to establish another system of forced labor. In W.E.B. Du Bois's words: 'The Codes spoke for themselves. . . . No open-minded student can read them without being convinced they meant nothing more nor less than slavery in daily toil.

Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 56–57. The outbreak of political speech among those without power was also, according to a disgruntled Democrat writing to liberal Senator Paul Douglas in the 1960s, the great evil of the Great Society: “I feel Mr. Johnson is much responsible for the present riot by his constant encouragement for the Negro to take any measure to assert himself & DEMAND his rights.” Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York: Scribner, 2008), 117.

The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. --“The Negro Child—His Self-Image,” in Saturday Review (New York, 21 Dec. 1963; repr. in The Price of the Ticket as “A Talk to Teachers,” 1985)     Europe

The more routine his days, the more unruly his nights. He woke after midnight, when the dormitory was dead, starting at imagined sounds—footsteps at the threshold, leather slapping the ceiling. He squinted at the darkness—nothing. Then he was up for hours, in a spell, agitated by rickety thoughts and weakened by an ebbing of the spirit. It wasn’t Spencer that undid him, or a supervisor or a new antagonist slumbering in room 2, rather it was that he’d stopped fighting. In keeping his head down, in his careful navigation so that he made it to lights-out without mishap, he fooled himself that he had prevailed. That he had outwitted Nickel because he got along and kept out of trouble. In fact he had been ruined. He was like one of those Negroes Dr. King spoke of in his letter from jail, so complacent and sleepy after years of oppression that they had adjusted to it and learned to sleep in it as their only bed.

Or a petty retribution like his father had faced organizing workers in the AFL in New York before the war. As bad as that had been, he’d witnessed how much worse circumstances were for Negroes in the South, or even the poor crackers down here whose sole comfort was knowing they were better off than Negroes.

Sometimes the bedsheet is a Confederate flag. I wonder how the Negro players feel about them. The worst part is that these things are hung by kids. Why the hell couldn’t they let that stuff die with their grandfathers? These are not rebels who want something new. These are rebels who want to bring back the old. Doug

Now, early in 1865, the war is over. The North does not especially want free Negroes, it wants trade and wealth. The South does not want a particular interpretation of the Constitution. It wants cheap Negro labor and the political and social power based on it. Had there been no Negroes, there would have been no war. Had no Negroes survived the war, peace would have been difficult because of hatred, loss and bitter fried. But its logical path would have been straight. The South would have returned to its place in congress with less than its former representation because of the growing North and West. These areas of growing manufacture and agriculture, railroad building and corporations, would have held the political power over the South until the South united with the new insurgency of the West or the Eastern democratic ideals. Industrialization might even have brought a third party representing labor and raised the proletariat to dominance.

The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them.

America must seek its own ways of atoning for the injustices she has inflicted upon her Negro citizens. I do not suggest atonement for atonement's sake or because there is need for self-punishment. I suggest atonement as the moral and practical way to bring the Negro's standards up to a realistic level. In facing the new American dilemma, the relevant question is not: "What more does the Negro want?" but rather: "How can we make freedom real and substantial for our colored citizens? What just course will ensure the greatest speed and completeness? And how do we combat opposition and overcome obstacles arising from the defaults of the past?

You wouldn’t suspect that there was such a thing as a soul if you went to Detroit. Everything is too new, too slick, too bright, too ruthless. Souls don’t grow in factories. Souls are killed in factories—even the niggardly ones. Detroit can do in a week for the white man what the South couldn’t do in a hundred years to the Negro.

I won’t let you stay here. Julia, we’re a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We’re destroying the Great Lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we’ve begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radio-active fallout that put poison into our children’s bones, and we knew it. We’ve made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to persuade our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we’re used to it.

celebration. Textbook authors present our nation as getting ever better in all areas, from race relations to transportation. The traditional portrayal of Reconstruction as a period of Yankee usurpation and Negro debauchery fits with the upward curve of progress, for if relations were bad in Reconstruction, perhaps not as bad as in slavery but surely worse than what came later, then we can imagine that race relations have gradually been getting better. However, the facts about Reconstruction compel us to acknowledge that in many ways race relations in this country have yet to return to the point reached in, say, 1870. In that year, to take a small but symbolic example, A. T. Morgan, a white state senator from Hinds County, Mississippi, married Carrie Highgate, a black woman from New York, and was reelected.48 Today this probably could not happen, not in Hinds County, Mississippi, or in many counties throughout the United States. Nonetheless, the archetype of progress prompts many white Americans to conclude that black Americans

All of this tells us that the white backlash is nothing new. White America has been backlashing on the fundamental God-given and human rights of Negro Americans for more than three hundred years. With all of her dazzling achievements and stupendous material strides, America has maintained its strange ambivalence on the question of racial justice.

The fear and apathy which had for so long cast a shadow on the life of the Negro community were gradually fading before a new spirit of courage and self respect. ... The longings and aspirations of nearly 50,000 people, tired people who had come to see that it is ultimately more honorable to walk the streets in dignity than to ride the buses in humilation.

He was born in Odessa and settled on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side in 1906; his family's house had been burned down the previous October. Pogroms, massacres. America was in the massacre racket, too, Heshie observed, but they concentrated on Negroes and Indians for the most part. He figured they'd come for him once they ran out, but that might take years.

While white mob violence against African Americans was an obsession in the South, it was not limited to that region. White supremacy was and is an American reality. Whites lynched blacks in nearly every state, including New York, Minnesota, and California. Wherever blacks were present in significant numbers, the threat of being lynched was always real. Blacks had to “watch their step,” no matter where they were in America. A black man could be walking down the road, minding his business, and his life could suddenly change by meeting a white man or a group of white men or boys who on a whim decided to have some fun with a Negro; and this could happen in Mississippi or New York, Arkansas, or Illinois. By the 1890s, lynching fever gripped the South, spreading like cholera, as white communities made blacks their primary target, and torture their focus. Burning the black victim slowly for hours was the chief method of torture. Lynching became a white media spectacle, in which prominent newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, announced to the public the place, date, and time of the expected hanging and burning of black victims. Often as many as ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children attended the event. It was a family affair, a ritual celebration of white supremacy, where women and children were often given the first opportunity to torture black victims—burning black flesh and cutting off genitals, fingers, toes, and ears as souvenirs. Postcards were made from the photographs taken of black victims with white lynchers and onlookers smiling as they struck a pose for the camera. They were sold for ten to twenty-five cents to members of the crowd, who then mailed them to relatives and friends, often with a note saying something like this: “This is the barbeque we had last night.”[17]

It’s no one’s fault really,” he continued. “A big city cannot afford to have its attention distracted from the important job of being a big city by such a tiny, unimportant item as your happiness or mine.” This came out of him easily, assuredly, and I was suddenly interested. On closer inspection there was something aesthetic and scholarly about him, something faintly professorial. He knew I was with him, listening, and his grey eyes were kind with offered friendliness. He continued: “Those tall buildings there are more than monuments to the industry, thought and effort which have made this a great city; they also occasionally serve as springboards to eternity for misfits who cannot cope with the city and their own loneliness in it.” He paused and said something about one of the ducks which was quite unintelligible to me. “A great city is a battlefield,” he continued. “You need to be a fighter to live in it, not exist, mark you, live. Anybody can exist, dragging his soul around behind him like a worn-out coat; but living is different. It can be hard, but it can also be fun; there’s so much going on all the time that’s new and exciting.” I could not, nor wished to, ignore his pleasant voice, but I was in no mood for his philosophising. “If you were a negro you’d find that even existing would provide more excitement than you’d care for.” He looked at me and suddenly laughed; a laugh abandoned and gay, a laugh rich and young and indescribably infectious. I laughed with him, although I failed to see anything funny in my remark. “I wondered how long it would be before you broke down and talked to me,” he said, when his amusement had quietened down. “Talking helps, you know; if you can talk with someone you’re not lonely any more, don’t you think?” As simple as that. Soon we were chatting away unreservedly, like old friends, and I had told him everything. “Teaching,” he said presently. “That’s the thing. Why not get a job as a teacher?” “That’s rather unlikely,” I replied. “I have had no training as a teacher.” “Oh, that’s not absolutely necessary. Your degrees would be considered in lieu of training, and I feel sure that with your experience and obvious ability you could do well.” “Look here, Sir, if these people would not let me near ordinary inanimate equipment about which I understand quite a bit, is it reasonable to expect them to entrust the education of their children to me?” “Why not? They need teachers desperately.” “It is said that they also need technicians desperately.” “Ah, but that’s different. I don’t suppose educational authorities can be bothered about the colour of people’s skins, and I do believe that in that respect the London County Council is rather outstanding. Anyway, there would be no need to mention it; let it wait until they see you at the interview.” “I’ve tried that method before. It didn’t work.” “Try it again, you’ve nothing to lose. I know for a fact that there are many vacancies for teachers in the East End of London.” “Why especially the East End of London?” “From all accounts it is rather a tough area, and most teachers prefer to seek jobs elsewhere.” “And you think it would be just right for a negro, I suppose.” The vicious bitterness was creeping back; the suspicion was not so easily forgotten. “Now, just a moment, young man.” He was wonderfully patient with me, much more so than I deserved. “Don’t ever underrate the people of the East End; from those very slums and alleyways are emerging many of the new breed of professional and scientific men and quite a few of our politicians. Be careful lest you be a worse snob than the rest of us. Was this the kind of spirit in which you sought the other jobs?

This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great “world house” in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu—a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace. However deeply American Negroes are caught in the struggle to be at last at home in our homeland of the United States, we cannot ignore the larger world house in which we are also dwellers. Equality with whites will not solve the problems of either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a world society stricken by poverty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war.

Greenspan said that Nixon should declare that, rather than allow inflationary forces to be unleashed, he would back “a tax increase as the lesser of two evils.” How could we square cutting the budget with our programs for the Negro? I reported Alan as stating “flatly that the Negro problem is not an economic problem and it is dangerous to think of its solution in financial terms.

In the Black World, the Preacher and Teacher embodied once the ideals of this people—the strife for another and a juster world, the vague dream of righteousness, the mystery of knowing; but to-day the danger is that these ideals, with their simple beauty and weird inspiration, will suddenly sink to a question of cash and a lust for gold.... What if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life? What if to the Mammonism of America be added the rising Mammonism of the re-born South, and the Mammonism of this South be reinforced by the budding Mammonism of its half-wakened black millions? Whither, then, is the new-world quest of Goodness and Beauty and Truth gone glimmering?

Indeed, by the end of a turbulent decade there was a new quality to Negro life. The Negro was no longer a subject of change; he was the active organ of change. He powered the drive. He set the pace. At the same time it had become clear that though white opposition could be defeated it remained a formidable force capable of hardening its resistance when the cost of change was increased.

Next day I was closely questioned about the team and its members. The children were somewhat surprised to learn that some had been College or University men; their vision of the American Negro, being so largely based on films, did not include high intellectual attainment. However, through discussion, I believe that slowly they were beginning to see all mankind from a new standpoint of essential dignity. One

In binghamton, new york, winter meant snow, and though I was young when we left, I was able to recall great heaps of it, and use that memory as evidence that North Carolina was, at best, a third-rate institution. What little snow there was would usually melt an hour or two after hitting the ground, and there you’d be in your windbreaker and unconvincing mittens, forming a lumpy figure made mostly of mud. Snow Negroes, we called them. The

The word for “revolution” in German is Umwälzung. What it means is a complete overturn—a complete change. The overthrow of King Farouk in Egypt and the succession of President Nasser is an example of a true revolution. It means the destroying of an old system, and its replacement with a new system. Another example is the Algerian revolution, led by Ben Bella; they threw out the French who had been there over 100 years. So how does anybody sound talking about the Negro in America waging some “revolution”? Yes, he is condemning a system—but he’s not trying to overturn the system, or to destroy it. The Negro’s so-called “revolt” is merely an asking to be accepted into the existing system! A true Negro revolt might entail, for instance, fighting for separate black states within this country—which several groups and individuals have advocated, long before Elijah Muhammad came along.

To an American Negro living in the northern part of the United States the word South has an unpleasant sound, an overtone of horror and of fear. For it is in the South that our ancestors were slaves for three hundred years, bought and sold like cattle. It is in the South today that we suffer the worst forms of racial persecution and economic exploitation--segregation, peonage, and lynching. It is in the Southern states that the color line is hard and fast, Jim Crow rules, and I am treated like a dog. Yet it is in the South that two-thirds of my people live: A great Black Belt stretching from Virginia to Texas, across the cotton plantations of Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, down into the orange groves of Florida and the sugar cane lands of Louisiana. It is in the South that black hands create the wealth that supports the great cities--Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, where the rich whites live in fine houses on magnolia-shaded streets and the Negroes live in slums restricted by law. It is in the South that what the Americans call the "race problem" rears its ugly head the highest and, like a snake with its eyes on a bird, holds the whole land in its power. It is in the South that hate and terror walk the streets and roads by day, sometimes quiet, sometimes violent, and sleep n the beds with the citizens at night.

In the end, it would turn out, just as Bishop Turner seemed to have forecast, that Black America did not need a New Negro; it needed the legal and political means to curtail the institutionalization of antiblack racism perpetuated against the Old Negro at every level in post-Reconstruction American society through an ideology gone rogue, the ideology of white supremacy. One can say that to thrive, the Old and New Negroes needed a New White Man.

The hard truth is that neither Negro nor white has yet done enough to expect the dawn of a new day. While much has been done, it has been accomplished by too few and on a scale too limited for the breadth of the goal. Freedom is not won by a passive acceptance of suffering. Freedom is won by a struggle against suffering. By this measure, Negroes have not yet paid the full price for freedom. And whites have not yet faced the full cost of justice.

Finally, we are confronted with the psychology and tradition of the country; if the Negro vote is so easily bought and sold, it is because it has been treated with so little respect; since no Negro dares seriously assume that any politician is concerned with the fate of Negroes, or would do much about it if he had the power, the vote must be bartered for what it will get, for whatever short-term goals can be managed. These goals are mainly economic and frequently personal, sometimes pathetic: bread or a new roof or five dollars, or, continuing up the scale, schools, houses or more Negroes in hitherto Caucasian jobs. The American commonwealth chooses to overlook what Negroes are never able to forget: they are not really considered a part of it. Like Aziz in A Passage to India or Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, they know that white people, whatever their love for justice, have no love for them.

If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we could call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong. A common way of earning a living gives them a common attitude toward life. Even their speech is colored and shaped by what they must undergo. Your Honor, injustice blots out one form of life, but another grows up in its place with its own rights, needs, and aspirations. What is happening here today is not injustice, but oppression, an attempt to throttle or stamp out a new form of life. And it is this new form of life that has grown up here in our midst that puzzles us, that expresses itself, like a weed growing from under a stone, in terms we call crime. Unless we grasp this problem in the light of this new reality, we cannot do more than salve our feelings of guilt and rage with more murder when a man, living under such conditions, commits an act which we call a crime.

Then he recalled what a Negro street speaker had said one night on the corner of 138th Street and Seventh Avenue in New York: that unorganized labor meant cheap labor; that the guarantee of cheap labor was an effective means of luring new industries into the South; that so long as the ignorant white masses could be kept thinking of the menace of the Negro to Caucasian race purity and political control, they would give little thought to labor organization.

The racist conscience of America is such that murder does not register as murder, really, unless the victim is white. And it was only when the newspapers and magazines started carrying pictures and stories of white demonstrators being beaten and maimed by mobs and police that the public be-gan to protest. Negroes have become so used to this double stan-dard that they, too, react differently to the death of a white. When white freedom riders were brutalized along with blacks, a sigh of relief went up from the black masses, because the blacks knew that white blood is the coin of freedom in a land where for four hundred years black blood has been shed unremarked and with impunity. America has never truly been outraged by the murder of a black man, woman, or child. White politicians may, if Negroes are aroused by a particular murder, say with their lips what they know with their minds they should feel with their hearts-but don't.

But the Catholic Church had another agenda for the Black (Israelite) people living in Africa.  They had to change what the natives in Africa already knew about the Old Testament and then add the New Testaments teachings, but with a “White Supremacy” Europeanized twist.  The first thing they had to do was establish the “Whiteness” of the Bible starting with Adam, Eve, Abraham, Jacob, the Children of Israel all the way down to Yeshua Mashiach (Jesus Christ).  They had to do away with the Sabbath and force the slaves to forget their laws.  They had to explain the Black Negro slaves’ role in the bible as “Cursed Canaanites”.   The “Gentile” Europeans (Greeks, Romans etc.) had to write and insert themselves into the Bible using the Apocrypha Books with the mysterious appearance of the White Greek Jewish Maccabean family.   Many of the Blacks in Africa bought this lie and continued to teach this to their children generation after generation. 

I am a Negro and I know, being dark, I have been due in the past to see dark days, but them days is passing. All the fiery crosses in the world is not going to scare me back into where I were before the Harlem riots, Martin Luther King, Adam Powell, and Malcolm X. Also, I might include that lady, Annie Lee Cooper, who hit Sheriff Clark in the eye in Alabama. When a Southern colored woman hits a Southern white sheriff in the eye in a public place like Selma, a new day has come.

Para chegar a San Giovanni tive necessariamente que regredir,quase como se Lila tivesse ido morar não em uma rua, em uma praça, mas num riacho do tempo passado, antes que fôssemos para a escola, um tempo negro, sem norma e sem respeito. Recorri ao dialeto mais violento do bairro, insultei, fui insultada, ameacei, fui sacaneada, respondi por minha vez sacaneando, uma arte torpe na qual eu era adestrada. Nápoles me servira muito em Pisa, mas Pisa não servia em Nápoles, era um estorvo.

A fear of cosmic indifference seemed comical, or downright naive. Tester looked back to Malone and Mr. Howard. Beyond them he saw the police forces at the barricades as they muscled the crowd of Negroes back; he saw the decaying facade of his tenement with new eyes; he saw the patrol cars parked in the middle of the road like three great black hounds waiting to pounce on all these gathered sheep. What was indifference compared to malice? “Indifference would be such a relief,” Tommy said.

Bella, mi vida era como una noche sin luna antes de encontrarte, muy oscura, pero al menos había estrellas, puntos de luz y motivaciones... Y entonces tú cruzaste mi cielo como un meteoro. De pronto, se encendió todo, todo estuvo lleno de brillantez y belleza. Cuando tú te fuiste, cuando el meteoro desapareció por el horizonte, todo se volvió negro. No había cambiado nada, pero mis ojos habían quedado cegados por la luz. Ya no podía ver las estrellas. Y nada tenía sentido. •La verdad, 523

Nazi persecution didn’t limit itself to race. Religion, national origin, alternative lifestyles, persons with disabilities—all were targets. How would you characterize the Slavs? Gypsies? Moors? All the lines get blurred. Even within Judaism, there are many races. There are Negro Jews in Ethiopia and Middle Eastern Jews in Iraq. There have been Jews in Japan since the 1860s. Poland was fractionally Jewish, but there were still three and a half million Jews living there in the 1930s.” “But still, today it all seems so incomprehensible.” Ben raised his eyebrows. “Incomprehensible because we’re Americans? Land of the free and home of the brave? Let’s not kid ourselves. We’ve authored our own chapters in the history of shame, periods where the world looked at us and shook its head. Early America built an economy based on slavery and it was firmly supported by law. Read the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott. We trampled entire cultures of Native Americans. ‘No Irish Need Apply’ was written on factory gates in nineteenth-century New York.” Ben shook his head. “We’d like to think we’re beyond such hatred, but the fact is, we can never let our guard down. That’s why this case is so important. To you and to me. It’s another reminder of what can happen when evil is allowed to incubate. Find a reason to turn your nose up at a culture, to denigrate a people because they’re different, and it’s not such a giant leap from ethnic subjugation to ethnic slaughter.” Catherine

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

And now, in Madrid, Spain's besieged capital, I've met wide-awake Negroes from various parts of the world--New York, our Middle West, the French West Indies, Cuba, Africa--some stationed here, others on leave from their battalions--all of them here because they know that if Fascism creeps across Spain, across Europe, and then across the world, there will be no place left for intelligent young Negroes at all. In fact, no decent place for any Negroes--because Fascism preaches the creed of Nordic supremacy and a world for whites alone.

I'd like to know which is worse: to be raped a hundred times by Negro pirates, to have one buttock cut off, to run the gauntlet in the Bulgar army, to be whipped and hanged in an auto-da-fé, to be dissected, to be a galley slave—in short, to suffer all the miseries we've all gone through—or to stay here doing nothing.” “That's a hard question,” said Candide. These remarks gave rise to new reflections. Martin concluded that man was born to live in either the convulsions of distress or the lethargy of boredom. Candide did not agree, but

Where there are so many negroes upon places as upon ours," wrote an Alabama woman to the governor, "it is quite necessary that there should be men who can and will controle them, especially at this time." Faced with the prospect of being left with sixty slaves, a Mississippi planter's wife expressed similar sentiments. "Do you think," she demanded of GovernorJohn Pettus, "that this woman's hand can keep them in check?" Women compelled to assume responsibility over slaves tended to regard their new role more as a duty than an opportunity.

A table made in April 1918 by Robert Wilton for the G-2 Section (Military Intelligence of the U. S. Army), shows that at the time of the Russian Revolution: there were 384 commissars (running Russia), including 2 Negroes, 13 Russians, 15 Chinese, 22 Armenians and more than 300 Jews. Of the latter number 264 had come to Russia from the United States since the downfall of the Imperial Government." (War Records Division of the National Archives. Record Group 120: Records of the American Expeditionary Forces.) Not even Russian Jews, but New York Jews!

The workman cut to the left, still laying on his horn, and roared around the drunkenly weaving limousine. He invited the driver of the limo to perform an illegal sex act on himself. To engage in oral congress with various rodents and birds. He articulated his own proposal that all persons of Negro blood return to their native continent. He expressed his sincere belief in the position the limo driver’s soul would occupy in the afterlife. He finished by saying that he believed he had met the limodriver’s mother in a New Orleans house of prostitution.

Lincoln thinks slavery is wrong—that I don’t deny—but he went to war to preserve the Union. He made that perfectly clear. He has even said, in public: ‘If I could save the Union without freeing a single slave, I’d do it.’ His words. Not mine.” He paused. “What does Lincoln want for the slaves? Who knows? From what I hear, his main idea for liberated slaves is to find a free colony in Africa or Central America, and send them there. Do you know he actually told a delegation of black men, to their faces, that he doesn’t want Negroes in the United States?

Cuando el barco se detuvo en el puerto de Manhattan, la tarde del día 2 de abril, Einstein se hallaba en cubierta vestido con un abrigo descolorido de lana gris y un sombrero de fieltro negro que ocultaba parte de su espesa cabellera, que empezaba a encanecer. En una mano llevaba una reluciente pipa de brezo, mientras con la otra sujetaba una desgastada funda de violín. «Parecía un artista —informaba el New York Times—. Pero bajo su desaliñada apariencia se ocultaba una mente científica cuyas deducciones han dejado perplejos a los intelectos más capaces de Europa.»

Across the street at the New Orleans headquarters of the Lighthouse for the Blind—a two-story building attached to a four-story stucco lighthouse—another Christmas party was under way, and Wright watched as the sightless guests arrived. Then, before his eyes, a curious scene unfolded. As they were greeted by their hosts, the blind whites were escorted to a large room at the front of the house, whereas the blind Negroes were taken to the rear, where they stayed. Separated. Transfixed, Wright had to look twice before it dawned on him: 'They couldn’t see to segregate themselves

Also in 1865, a South Carolina planter wrote to the New York Tribune that the conduct of the Negro in the late crisis of our affairs has convinced me that we were all laboring under a delusion. . . . I believed that these people were content, happy, and attached to their masters. But events and reflection have caused me to change these positions. . . . If they were content, happy and attached to their masters, why did they desert him in the moment of his need and flock to an enemy, whom they did not know; and thus left their perhaps really good masters whom they did know from infancy?

It is, however, important to understand that giving a man his due may often mean giving him special treatment. I am aware of the fact that this has been a troublesome concept for many liberals, since it conflicts with their traditional ideal of equal opportunity and equal treatment of people according to their individual merits. But this is a day which demands new thinking and the reevaluation of old concepts. A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him, in order to equip him to compete on a just and equal basis.

In an effort to demonstrate their commitment to a genuinely multiracial, working-class movement against white elites, the Populists made strides toward racial integration, a symbol of their commitment to class-based unity. African Americans throughout the South responded with great hope and enthusiasm, eager to be true partners in a struggle for social justice. According to Woodward, “It is altogether probable that during the brief Populist upheaval in the nineties Negroes and native whites achieved a greater comity of mind and harmony of political purpose than ever before or since in the South.

The dangerously clear logic of the Negro's position will more and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood. And finally, when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortions; that color and race are not crimes, and yet it is they which in this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South, and West.

What it comes to is that if we - who can scarcely be considered a white nation - persist in thinking of ourselves as one, we condemn ourselves, with the truly white nations, to sterility and decay. Whereas if we could accept ourselves as we are, we might bring new life to the Western achievements and transform them. The price of this transformation the unconditional freedom of the Negro. It is not too much to say that he - who has been so long rejected - must now be embraced and at no matter what psychic or social risk. He is the key figure in his country, and the American future is precisely as bright or as dark as his.

Stephens resumed speaking as the crowd quieted. He referred to one final “improvement” the Confederate Constitution had introduced, a brief but crucial clause that banned forever any “bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves.” “The new Constitution has put at rest, forever, all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization.” This question, Stephens baldly admitted, “was the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.”20 Stephens then referenced

On the labour front in 1919 there was an unprecedented number of strikes involving many millions of workers. One of the lager strikes was mounted by the AF of L against the United States Steel Corporation. At that time workers in the steel industry put in an average sixty-eight-hour week for bare subsistence wages. The strike spread to other plants, resulting in considerable violence -- the death of eighteen striking workers, the calling out of troops to disperse picket lines, and so forth. By branding the strikers Bolsheviks and thereby separating them from their public support, the Corporation broke the strike. In Boston, the Police Department went on strike and governor Calvin Coolidge replaced them. In Seattle there was a general strike which precipitated a nationwide 'red scare'. this was the first red scare. Sixteen bombs were found in the New York Post Office just before May Day. The bombs were addressed to men prominent in American life, including John D. Rockefeller and Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. It is not clear today who was responsible for those bombs -- Red terrorists, Black anarchists, or their enemies -- but the effect was the same. Other bombs pooped off all spring, damaging property, killing and maiming innocent people, and the nation responded with an alarm against Reds. It was feared that at in Russia, they were about to take over the country and shove large cocks into everyone's mother. Strike that. The Press exacerbated public feeling. May Day parades in the big cities were attacked by policemen, and soldiers and sailors. The American Legion, just founded, raided IWW headquarters in the State of Washington. Laws against seditious speech were passed in State Legislatures across the country and thousands of people were jailed, including a Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee who was sentenced to twenty years in prison. To say nothing of the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 which took care of thousands more. To say nothing of Eugene V. Debs. On the evening of 2 January 1920, Attorney General Palmer, who had his eye on the White House, organized a Federal raid on Communist Party offices throughout the nation. With his right-hand assistant, J. Edgar Hoover, at his right hand, Palmer effected the arrest of over six thousand people, some Communist aliens, some just aliens, some just Communists, and some neither Communists nor aliens but persons visiting those who had been arrested. Property was confiscated, people chained together, handcuffed, and paraded through the streets (in Boston), or kept in corridors of Federal buildings for eight days without food or proper sanitation (in Detroit). Many historians have noted this phenomenon. The raids made an undoubted contribution to the wave of vigilantism winch broke over the country. The Ku Klux Klan blossomed throughout the South and West. There were night raidings, floggings, public hangings, and burnings. Over seventy Negroes were lynched in 1919, not a few of them war veterans. There were speeches against 'foreign ideologies' and much talk about 'one hundred per cent Americanism'. The teaching of evolution in the schools of Tennessee was outlawed. Elsewhere textbooks were repudiated that were not sufficiently patriotic. New immigration laws made racial distinctions and set stringent quotas. Jews were charged with international conspiracy and Catholics with trying to bring the Pope to America. The country would soon go dry, thus creating large-scale, organized crime in the US. The White Sox threw the Series to the Cincinnati Reds. And the stage was set for the trial of two Italian-born anarchists, N. Sacco and B. Vanzetti, for the alleged murder of a paymaster in South Braintree, Mass. The story of the trial is well known and often noted by historians and need not be recounted here. To nothing of World War II--

Its foundations are laid,” said Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, “its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth….With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.

A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work in itself is good in itself—for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery. I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this: "We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry fort you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.” This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance if it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions. Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothings else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line “Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres” by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. “Anything,” he thinks, “any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.

In my body were many bloods, some dark blood, all blended in the fire of six or more generations. I was, then, either a new type of man or the very oldest. In any case I was inescapably myself. . . . If I achieved greatness of human stature, then just to the degree that I did I would justify all the blood in me. If I proved worthless, then I would betray all. In my own mind I could not see the dark blood as something quite different and apart. But if people wanted to say this dark blood was Negro blood and if they then wanted to call me a Negro - this was up to them. Fourteen years of my life I had lived in the white group, four years I had lived in the colored group. In my experience there had been no main difference between the two. But if people wanted to isolate and fasten on those four years and to say that therefore I was colored, this too was up to them. . . .I determined what I would do. To my real friends of both groups, I would, at the right time, voluntarily define my position. As for people at large, naturally I would go my way and say nothing unless the question was raised. If raised, I would meet it squarely, going into as much detail as seemed desirable for the occasion. Or again, if it was not the person's business I would either tell him nothing or the first nonsense that came into my head.

1860 there had risen in West Dougherty perhaps the richest slave kingdom the modern world ever knew. A hundred and fifty barons commanded the labor of nearly six thousand Negroes, held sway over farms with ninety thousand acres tilled land, valued even in times of cheap soil at three millions of dollars. Twenty thousand bales of ginned cotton went yearly to England, New and Old; and men that came there bankrupt made money and grew rich. In a single decade the cotton output increased four-fold and the value of lands was tripled. It was the heyday of the nouveau riche, and a life of careless extravagance among the masters. Four and six bobtailed thoroughbreds rolled their coaches to town; open hospitality and gay entertainment were the rule. Parks and groves were laid out, rich with flower and vine, and in the midst stood the low wide-halled “big house,” with its porch and columns and great fireplaces. And yet with all this there was something sordid, something forced,—a certain feverish unrest and recklessness; for was not all this show and tinsel built upon a groan? “This land was a little Hell,” said a ragged, brown, and grave-faced man to me. We were seated near a roadside blacksmith shop, and behind was the bare ruin of some master’s home. “I’ve seen niggers drop dead in the furrow, but they were kicked aside, and the plough never

This book is fiction and all the characters are my own, but it was inspired by the story of the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. I first heard of the place in the summer of 2014 and discovered Ben Montgomery’s exhaustive reporting in the Tampa Bay Times. Check out the newspaper’s archive for a firsthand look. Mr. Montgomery’s articles led me to Dr. Erin Kimmerle and her archaeology students at the University of South Florida. Their forensic studies of the grave sites were invaluable and are collected in their Report on the Investigation into the Deaths and Burials at the Former Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, Florida. It is available at the university’s website. When Elwood reads the school pamphlet in the infirmary, I quote from their report on the school’s day-to-day functions. Officialwhitehouseboys.org is the website of Dozier survivors, and you can go there for the stories of former students in their own words. I quote White House Boy Jack Townsley in chapter four, when Spencer is describing his attitude toward discipline. Roger Dean Kiser’s memoir, The White House Boys: An American Tragedy, and Robin Gaby Fisher’s The Boys of the Dark: A Story of Betrayal and Redemption in the Deep South (written with Michael O’McCarthy and Robert W. Straley) are excellent accounts. Nathaniel Penn’s GQ article “Buried Alive: Stories From Inside Solitary Confinement” contains an interview with an inmate named Danny Johnson in which he says, “The worst thing that’s ever happened to me in solitary confinement happens to me every day. It’s when I wake up.” Mr. Johnson spent twenty-seven years in solitary confinement; I have recast that quote in chapter sixteen. Former prison warden Tom Murton wrote about the Arkansas prison system in his book with Joe Hyams called Accomplices to the Crime: The Arkansas Prison Scandal. It provides a ground’s-eye view of prison corruption and was the basis of the movie Brubaker, which you should see if you haven’t. Julianne Hare’s Historic Frenchtown: Heart and Heritage in Tallahassee is a wonderful history of that African-American community over the years. I quote the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. a bunch; it was energizing to hear his voice in my head. Elwood cites his “Speech Before the Youth March for Integrated Schools” (1959); the 1962 LP Martin Luther King at Zion Hill, specifically the “Fun Town” section; his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”; and his 1962 speech at Cornell College. The “Negroes are Americans” James Baldwin quote is from “Many Thousands Gone” in Notes of a Native Son. I was trying to see what was on TV on July 3, 1975. The New York Times archive has the TV listings for that night, and I found a good nugget.

There was a mystic wraith of fog over the brown water that night, together with dark driftwoods; and across the way New Orleans glowed orange-bright, with a few dark ships at her hem, ghostly fogbound Cereno ships with Spanish balconies and ornamental poops, till you got up close and saw they were just old freighters from Sweden or Panama. The ferry fires glowed in the night; the same Negroes plied the shovel and sang. Old Big Slim Hazard had once worked on the Algiers ferry as a deckhand, that made me think of Mississippi Gene too; and as the river poured down from mid-America by starlight I knew, I knew like mad that everything I had ever known and would ever know was One.

One aspect of the civil-rights struggle that receives little attention is the contribution it makes to the whole society. The Negro in winning rights for himself produces substantial benefits for the nation. Just as a doctor will occasionally reopen a wound, because a dangerous infection hovers beneath the half-healed surface, the revolution for human rights is opening up unhealthy areas in American life and permitting a new and wholesome healing to take place. Eventually the civil-rights movement will have contributed infinitely more to the nation than the eradication of racial injustice. It will have enlarged the concept of brotherhood to a vision of total interrelatedness.

One is proposing a future to us, one does so by condemning the past. It is into this future also that we want to see clearly. It is these principles that we would like to look at directly. For we already foresee that these new ethics refer to a strange universe, a universe with something sick about it, an elastic universe where our eyes no longer recognize things: but a universe which is that of others, precisely that of which Bernanos had a presentiment when he feared that one day the dreams, locked up in the sly brain of a small Negro shoeshiner in a New York ghetto, would come true. We are there. Our minds are doped. We have been struck by Circe. We have all become Jewish.

In Paris (though he had just come four thousand miles from the river where it was born, though Bessie Smith herself had sung at a Negro dance ten miles from Briartree while they were packing for their trip abroad, and though Duff Conway, the greatest horn man of his time—for whose scratched and worn recordings Jeff was to pay as high as fifty and sixty dollars apiece—had been born and raised in Bristol, son of the cook in the Barcroft house on Lamar Street) Jeff discovered jazz. He fell among the cultists, the essayists on the ‘new’ American rhythms, including the one of whom Eddie Condon, when asked for an opinion, later said, “Would I go over there and tell him how to jump on a grape?

On November 22, 1860, James Clement Furman, a prominent Baptist minister and first president of Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, published an open letter that encapsulated the South’s great abiding fear of what would happen if slavery were abolished. “Then every negro in South Carolina and every other Southern State will be his own master; nay, more than that, will be the equal of every one of you.” Another Southern orator, quoted in the New York Herald, issued an even more vivid warning. “What will you do with these people? Will you allow them to sit at your own table, marry your daughters, govern your States, sit in your halls of Congress and perhaps be president of the United States?

Across the United States, there are more than seventeen hundred monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a breakaway republic whose constitution and leaders were unequivocal in declaring the purpose of their new nation. "Its foundations are laid," "its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth... With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye by nature, or by curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.

Recently, Roy Wilkins and I appeared on the television program "Meet the Press." There were the usual questions about how much more the Negro wants, but there seemed to be a new undercurrent of implications related to the sturdy new strength of our movement. Without the courtly complexities, we were, in effect, being asked if we could be trusted to hold back the surging tides of discontent so that those on the shore would not be made too uncomfortable by the buffeting and onrushing waves. Some of the questions implied that our leadership would be judged in accordance with our capacity to "keep the Negro from going too far." The quotes are mine, but I think the phrase mirrors the thinking of the panelists as well as of many other white Americans.

While Negroes form the vast majority of America's disadvantaged, there are millions of white poor who would also benefit from such a bill. The moral justification for special measures for Negroes is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery. Many poor whites, however, were the derivative victims of slavery. As long as labor was cheapened by the involuntary servitude of the black man, the freedom of white labor, especially in the South, was little more than a myth. It was free only to bargain from the depressed base imposed by slavery upon the whole labor market. Nor did this derivative bondage end when formal slavery gave way to the de-facto slavery of discrimination. To this day the white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education. In one sense it is more evil for them, because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors. It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor. A Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged could mark the rise of a new era, in which the full resources of the society would be used to attack the tenacious poverty which so paradoxically exists in the midst of plenty.

Across the United States, there are more than seventeen hundred monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a breakaway republic whose constitution and leaders were unequivocal in declaring the purpose of their new nation. “Its foundations are laid,” said Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, “its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth….With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place.

The beatest characters in the country swarmed on the sidewalks—all of it under those soft Southern California stars that are lost in the brown halo of the huge desert encampment LA really is. You could smell tea, weed, I mean marijuana, floating in the air, together with the chili beans and beer. That grand wild sound of bop floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie woogie in the American night. Everybody looked like Hassel. Wild Negroes with bop caps and goatees came laughing by; then longhaired brokendown hipsters straight off Route 66 from New York; then old desert rats, carrying packs and heading for a park bench at the Plaza; then Methodist ministers with raveled sleeves, and an occasional Nature Boy saint in beard and sandals.

But Du Bois could not entirely expunge his personal views from his own scholarship, a limit he recognized and fully admitted in the opening pages of The Philadelphia Negro.141 From “Conservation” to the American Academy of Political and Social Science address to the final Philadelphia report, there is an unmistakable tension between his elitist sensibility and Victorian concern about individual moral accountability, and his professional view of crime as a “tangible phenomena of Negro Prejudice.” In The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois did not hesitate to moralize against the young black gamblers and prostitutes of Philadelphia’s corrupt Seventh Ward, or to wage a full-scale rhetorical attack on the immorality of poor black southerners.142 In Du Bois’s early writings, in Hoffman’s writings, and in the writings of many others

Roosevelt wouldn't interfere even when he found out that Moses was discouraging Negroes from using many of his state parks. Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people... He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!' ... He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just The Public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons -- just to make it a better public." Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low -- too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using "white" beach areas -- the best beaches -- by a system Shapiro calls "flagging"; the handful of Negro lifeguards [...] were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out. When Negro civic groups from the hot New York City slums began to complain about this treatment, Roosevelt ordered an investigation and an aide confirmed that "Bob Moses is seeking to discourage large Negro parties from picnicking at Jones Beach, attempting to divert them to some other of the state parks." Roosevelt gingerly raised the matter with Moses, who denied the charge violently -- and the Governor never raised the matter again.

One unfortunate thing about Black Power is that it gives priority to race precisely at a time when the impact of automation and other forces have made the economic question fundamental for blacks and whites alike. In this context a slogan “Power for Poor People” would be much more appropriate than the slogan “Black Power.” However much we pool our resources and “buy black,” this cannot create the multiplicity of new jobs and provide the number of low-cost houses that will lift the Negro out of the economic depression caused by centuries of deprivation. Neither can our resources supply quality integrated education. All of this requires billions of dollars which only an alliance of liberal-labor-civil-rights forces can stimulate. In short, the Negroes’ problem cannot be solved unless the whole of American society takes a new turn toward greater economic justice.

God has wrought many things out of oppression. He has endowed his creatures with the capacity to create-and from this capacity has flowed the sweet songs of sorrow and joy that have allowed man to cope with his environment and many different situations. Jazz speaks for life. The Blues tell the story of life’s difficulties, and if you think for a moment, you will realize that they take the hardest realities of life and put them into music, only to come out with some new hope or sense of triumph. This is triumphant music. Modern Jazz has continued in this tradition, singing the songs of a more complicated urban existence. When life itself offers no order and meaning, the musician creates an order and meaning from the sounds of the earth which flow through his instrument. It is no wonder that so much of the search for identity among American Negroes was championed by Jazz musicians. Long before the modern essayists and scholars wrote of racial identity as a problem for a multiracial world, musicians were returning to their roots to affirm that which was stirring within their souls. Much of the power of our Freedom Movement in the United States has come from this music. It has strengthened us with its sweet rhythms when courage began to fail. It has calmed us with its rich harmonies when spirits were down. And now, Jazz is exported to the world. For in the particular struggle of the Negro in America there is something akin to the universal struggle of modern man. Everybody has the Blues. Everybody longs for meaning. Everybody needs to love and be loved. Everybody needs to clap hands and be happy. Everybody longs for faith. In music, especially this broad category called Jazz, there is a stepping stone towards all of these.

In Broadway, I suddenly found myself face to face with William de la Touche Clancey. "Well!" A long drawn-out syllable, in which fear and condescension were unpleasantly mingled. "What is the young Old Patroon about to turn his hand to next?" "The Vauxhall Gardens, I should think." My dislike of Clancey is almost physical. Yet I stare at him with fascination; note that his protuberant eyes are yellowish; that he scratches himself compulsively; that his tongue darts in and out of his mouth like a lizard's catching flies. "Of the delicious nymphs you sport with there?" "Of the delicious fauns, too — and their goatish friends." "Uh-huh..." A long, drawn-out attempt at sounding amused failed of its object. "I hope you realize that your editor's unholy passion for the Negro grows more embarrassing each day. If I were he I should beware. He might simply vanish one dark night." "Murdered? Or sold into slavery?" Clancey recently delighted his admirers by proposing that since the institution of slavery has been an integral part of every high civilization (and peculiarly well-adapted to those nations that follow the word as well as the spirit of Old and New Testaments), poor whites should be bought and sold as well as blacks. "I don't believe that poor sick Mr. Leggett would command a high price in the bazaar. Only his diseased mind would have a certain morbid interest to the special collector. You, on the other hand, ought to fetch a pretty price." "More than the usual two dollars you pay?" Two dollars is the current rate for a male prostitute. "Much more! Why, just for those pink Dutch cheeks alone!" It would be nice to record that I thought to something terminal to say but in my rage I could think of absolutely nothing and so left him with the last word.

When we blame those who brought about the brutal murder of Emmett Till, we have to count President Eisenhower, who did not consider the national honor at stake when white Southerners prevented African Americans from voting; who would not enforce the edicts of the highest court in the land, telling Chief Justice Earl Warren, 'All [opponents of desegregation] are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in schools alongside some big, overgrown Negroes.' We must count Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr., who demurred that the federal government had no jurisdiction in the political assassinations of George Lee and Lamar Smith that summer, thus not only preventing African Americans from voting but also enabling Milam and Bryant to feel confident that they could murder a fourteen-year-old boy with impunity. Brownell, a creature of politics, likewise refused to intervene in the Till case. We must count the politicians who ran for office in Mississippi thumping the podium for segregation and whipping crowds into a frenzy about the terrifying prospects of school desegregation and black voting. This goes double for the Citizens' Councils, which deliberately created an environment in which they knew white terrorism was inevitable. We must count the jurors and the editors who provided cover for Milam, Bryant, and the rest. Above all, we have to count the millions of citizens of all colors and in all regions who knew about the rampant racial injustice in America and did nothing to end it. The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam's and Bryant's acquittals: 'The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don't want it to stop. If we wanted to, we would.

What the turbulent months of the campaign and the election revealed most of all, I think, was that the American people were voicing a profound demand for change. On the one hand, the Humphrey people were demanding a Marshall Plan for our diseased cities and an economic solution to our social problems. The Nixon and Wallace supporters, on the other hand, were making their own limited demands for change. They wanted more "law and order," to be achieved not through federal spending but through police, Mace, and the National Guard. We must recognize and accept the demand for change, but now we must struggle to give it a progressive direction. For the immediate agenda, I would make four proposals. First, the Electoral College should be eliminated. It is archaic, undemocratic, and potentially very dangerous. Had Nixon not achieved a majority of the electoral votes, Wallace might have been in the position to choose and influence our next President. A shift of only 46,000 votes in the states of Alaska, Delaware, New Jersey, and Missouri would have brought us to that impasse. We should do away with this system, which can give a minority and reactionary candidate so much power and replace it with one that provides for the popular election of the President. It is to be hoped that a reform bill to this effect will emerge from the hearings that will soon be conducted by Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana. Second, a simplified national registration law should be passed that provides for universal permanent registration and an end to residence requirements. Our present system discriminates against the poor who are always underregistered, often because they must frequently relocate their residence, either in search of better employment and living conditions or as a result of such poorly planned programs as urban renewal (which has been called Negro removal). Third, the cost of the presidential campaigns should come from the public treasury and not from private individuals. Nixon, who had the backing of wealthy corporate executives, spent $21 million on his campaign. Humphrey's expenditures totaled only $9.7 million. A system so heavily biased in favor of the rich cannot rightly be called democratic. And finally, we must maintain order in our public meetings. It was disgraceful that each candidate, for both the presidency and the vice-presidency, had to be surrounded by cordons of police in order to address an audience. And even then, hecklers were able to drown him out. There is no possibility for rational discourse, a prerequisite for democracy, under such conditions. If we are to have civility in our civil life, we must not permit a minority to disrupt our public gatherings.

As negroes moved from unionism toward political action, white labor in the North not only moved in the opposite direction from political action to union organization, but also evolved the American Blindspot for the Negro and his problems. It lost interest and vital touch with Southern labor and acted as though the millions of laborers in the South did not exist. Thus labor went into the great war of 1877 against Northern capitalists unsupported by the black man, and the black man went his way in the South to strengthen and consolidate his power, unsupported by Northern labor. Suppose for a moment that Northern labor had stopped the bargain of 1876 and maintained the power of the labor vote in the South; and suppose that the Negro with new and dawning consciousness of the demands of labor as differentiated from the demands of capitalists, had used his vote more specifically for the benefit of white labor, South and North?

New Iberia is not New Orleans and we do not share its violent history, one that in the past has included a homicide rate equaled only by that of Washington, D.C. Here, whites and people of color work and live side by side. But nonetheless a peculiar kind of racial ill ease still exists in our small city on Bayou Teche. Maybe it’s indicative of the shadow that the pre–civil rights era still casts upon all the states of the old Confederacy. Perhaps we fear our own memories. I think as white people we know deep down inside ourselves the exact nature of the deeds we or our predecessors committed against people of color. I think we know that if our roles were reversed, if we had suffered the same degree of injury that was imposed upon the Negro race, we would not be particularly magnanimous when payback time rolled around. I think we know that in all probability we would cut the throats of the people who had made our lives miserable.

Well, now, if I didn’t think you sewed his collar with white thread, but it’s black.” “Why, I did sew it with white! Tom!” But Tom did not wait for the rest. As he went out at the door he said: “Siddy, I’ll lick you for that.” In a safe place Tom examined two large needles which were thrust into the lapels of his jacket, and had thread bound about them—one needle carried white thread and the other black. He said: “She’d never noticed if it hadn’t been for Sid. Confound it! sometimes she sews it with white, and sometimes she sews it with black. I wish to geeminy she’d stick to one or t’other—I can’t keep the run of ’em. But I bet you I’ll lam Sid for that. I’ll learn him!” He was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy very well though—and loathed him. Within two minutes, or even less, he had forgotten all his troubles. Not because his troubles were one whit less heavy and bitter to him than a man’s are to a man, but because a new and powerful interest bore them down and drove them out of his mind for the time—just as men’s misfortunes are forgotten in the excitement of new enterprises. This new interest was a valued novelty in whistling, which he had just acquired from a negro, and he was suffering to practise it undisturbed. It consisted in a peculiar bird-like turn, a sort of liquid warble, produced by touching the tongue to the roof of the mouth at short intervals in the midst of the music—the reader probably remembers how to do it, if he has ever been a boy. Diligence and attention soon gave him the knack of it, and he strode down the street with his mouth full of harmony and his soul full of gratitude. He felt much as an astronomer feels who has discovered a new planet—no doubt, as far as strong, deep, unalloyed pleasure is concerned, the advantage was with the boy, not the astronomer. The summer evenings were long. It was not dark, yet.

The dangerously clear logic of the Negro’s position will more and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen!

With Selma and the Voting Rights Act one phase of development in the civil rights revolution came to an end. A new phase opened, but few observers realized it or were prepared for its implications. For the vast majority of white Americans, the past decade—the first phase—had been a struggle to treat the Negro with a degree of decency, not of equality. White America was ready to demand that the Negro should be spared the lash of brutality and coarse degradation, but it had never been truly committed to helping him out of poverty, exploitation or all forms of discrimination. The outraged white citizen had been sincere when he snatched the whips from the Southern sheriffs and forbade them more cruelties. But when this was to a degree accomplished, the emotions that had momentarily inflamed him melted away. White Americans left the Negro on the ground and in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor. It appeared that the white segregationist and the ordinary white citizen had more in common with one another than either had with the Negro.

The traumatic aspect of drinking ayahuasca is that in order to heal yourself, you must first confront the wound; by forcing you to deal with your own inner garbage, ayahuasca shows you things about yourself that you might not want to see. I wish that a whole country could drink ayahuasca—not merely every individual citizen of a country, but the country itself, the spirit of the country. I wish that a flag could drink ayahuasca, that we could just fold the Stars and Stripes into the shape of a cup, pour in the tea, and transport Uncle Sam into another dimension. He’d have to fight his way out of some nightmares, but he’d be cleansed. What would he find? William S. Burroughs wrote that when you drink ayahuasca, “The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian—new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized—pass through your body.” When Burroughs drank, he actually saw himself transformed into both a black man and a black woman. What if some freedom-hating narcoterrorists snuck into the Fox News studios and put ayahuasca in Sean Hannity’s coffee, just before he went live? What would be the day’s fair and balanced news for America? If America drank ayahuasca and then withdrew into the filthy pit of its own heart, confronting all its fears and hate and finally purging itself of that negative energy, maybe America would come out Muslim: sucked through a black hole by the Black Mind, young Latter-Day Saint crackers with smooth cheeks, short-sleeved white shirts, and name tags confront nightmarish visions of getting swallowed whole by giant grotesque “Jolly Nigger” coin banks and then find themselves vomited back up as Nubian Islamic Hebrews in turbans and robes selling incense on the subways. The “God Hates Fags” pastor, eyes wild with a new passion for Allah, boards a helicopter to drop thousands of Qur’ans upon the small towns below. I want to see ayahuasca’s vine goddess clean out America’s poison. But what would happen if a religion could drink the vine? What if I poured ayahuasca into my Qur’an?

For all the style and excitement of the new team, and all the great promise, 1961 was a terrible year for the Kennedy Administration. The young President had arrived in the White House with a far slimmer margin of victory than he hoped, a mere 100,000 votes. It was not one of the great mandates, rather a margin which seemed to strengthen his enemies more than his friends, and the mandate of getting America moving again was questionable. America might move at his demand, but in which direction? And in what way could he move it? By building more and heavier missiles? Turning around an irrational policy on China? Bringing the nation together by accelerating long-neglected commitments to American Negroes? His nomination, his campaign, his election had meant many things to many people; now they waited, and many would find themselves disappointed in that first year. He was the first of a new kind of media candidate flashed daily into our consciousness by television during the campaign, and as such he had managed to stir the aspirations and excited millions of people.

Since I saw them pictures a while back on the front page of The New York Times of that police dog in Birmingham biting a young black student in the stomach, I have ceased to like white folks," said Simple. "As bad as Birmingham is," I said, "surely you do not blame white people in New York or Detroit or San Francisco for that Alabama dog." "I do," said Simple, "because white folks is in the majority every-where. They control the government in Washington, and if they let such doings go on in this American country, such as has been going on in Alabama and Mississippi, I blame them all. If white folks was bit by police dogs and prodded with electric rods, you can bet your bottom dollar something would be done about it—and quick—before you could say Jackie Robinson." "You are no doubt right," I said, "but as long as they themselves are not bitten by dogs and prodded by electric rods and denied the right to march or to vote, most white folks in the North will do very little to help Southern Negroes." "And I will do very little toward loving them," said Simple.

When we say that the Negro wants absolute and immediate freedom and equality, not in Africa or in some imaginary state, but right here in this land today, the answer is disturbingly terse to people who are not certain they wish to believe it. Yet this is the fact. Negroes no longer are tolerant of or interested in compromise. American history is replete with compromise. As splendid as are the words of the Declaration of Independence, there are disquieting implications in the fact that the original phrasing was altered to delete a condemnation of the British monarch for his espousal of slavery. American history chronicles the Missouri Compromise, which permitted the spread of slavery to new states; the Hayes-Tilden Compromise, which withdrew the federal troops from the South and signaled the end of Reconstruction; the Supreme Court' compromise in Plessy v. Ferguson, which enunciated the infamous "separate but equal" philosophy. These measures compromised not only the liberty of the Negro but the integrity of America. In the bursting mood that has overtaken the Negro in 1963, the word "compromise" is profane and pernicious.

We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly-spawning class of human beings who should never have been born at all.1 —Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization In 2009, Hillary Clinton came to Houston, Texas, to receive the Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthood. Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood and the award is its highest prize. In receiving the award, Hillary said of Sanger, “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity, her vision. I am really in awe of her. There are a lot of lessons we can learn from her life and the cause she launched and fought for and sacrificed so greatly.”2 What was Margaret Sanger’s vision? What was the cause to which she devoted her life? Sanger is known as a champion of birth control, of providing women with the means to avoid unwanted pregnancies. But the real Margaret Sanger was very different from how she’s portrayed in Planned Parenthood brochures. The real Margaret Sanger did not want women in general to limit their pregnancies. She wanted white, wealthy, educated women to have more children, and poor, uneducated, black women to have none. “Unwanted” for Sanger didn’t mean unwanted by the mother—it meant unwanted by Sanger. Sanger’s influence contributed to the infamous Tuskegee experiments in which poor blacks were deliberately injected with syphilis without their knowledge. Today the Tuskegee Project is falsely portrayed as an example of southern backwardness and American bigotry; in fact, it was a progressive scheme carried out with the very eugenic goals that Margaret Sanger herself championed. In 1926, Sanger spoke to a Women’s Chapter of the Ku Klux Klan in New Jersey about her solution for reducing the black birthrate. She also sponsored a Negro Project specifically designed, in her vocabulary, to get rid of “human beings who should never have been born.” In one of her letters Sanger said, “We do not want word to get out that we are trying to exterminate the Negro population.”3 The racists loved it; other KKK speaking invitations followed. Now it may seem odd that a woman with such views would be embraced by Planned Parenthood—even odder that she would be a role model for Hillary Clinton. Why would they celebrate Sanger given her racist philosophy? In

And another thing that makes Moscow different from Chicago or Cleveland, or New York, is that in the cities at home Negroes--like me--must stay away from a great many places--hotels, clubs, parks, theatres, factories, offices, and union halls--because they are not white. And in Moscow, all the doors are open to us just the same of course, and I find myself forgetting that the Russians are white folks. They're too damn decent and polite. To walk into a big hotel without the doorman yelling at me (at my age), "Hey, boy, where're you going?" Or to sit at the table in any public restaurant and not be told, "We don't serve Negroes here." Or to have the right of seeking a job at any factory or in any office where I am qualified to work and never be turned down on account of color or a WHITE ONLY sign at the door. To dance with a white woman in the dining room of a fine restaurant and not be dragged out by the neck--is to wonder if you're really living in a city full of white folks (as is like Moscow). But then the papers of the other lands are always calling the Muscovites red. I guess it's the red that makes the difference. I'll be glad when Chicago gets that way, and Birmingham.

Strangely, “Horror in the Nursery” never mentioned that the location of Wertham’s research site was Harlem. The first sentence of the piece set the scene: “In the basement of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church parish house in uptown New York … ,” evoking associations with WASPy Anglicanism without a hint of how far uptown the Lafargue Clinic was. The text never mentioned Negro culture or, for that matter, race or ethnicity in any context; and all the children in the photographs, which were staged, were white. Wertham, interviewed for the article prior to the Supreme Court ruling on Winters v. New York, anticipated objections to his criticism of comics on First Amendment grounds. Still, he called for legislative action. “The publishers will raise a howl about freedom of speech and of the press,” he told Crist: Nonsense. We are dealing with the mental health of a generation—the care of which we have left too long in the hands of unscrupulous persons whose only interest is greed and financial gain … If those responsible refuse to clean up the comic-book market—and to all appearances most of them do, the time has come to legislate these books off the newsstands and out of the candy stores.

The election of 1960 can, if one wills, be seen as an interlocking set of ifs: if Nixon had made up his mind which he wanted, the Northern Negro or Southern white vote; if the Puerto Rican Catholic bishops had made their intolerant intervention into Puerto Rican politics earlier and if Nixon had taken advantage of it; if the hysterical States-Righters of Dallas had not roughed up Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson in the hotel lobby; if Eisenhower had been used earlier; if Nixon had moved as forthrightly as did John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy in the Martin Luther King arrest; if only the citizen Democrats of California and the new coagulating boss groups of California had been able to work together in harness, as they could not; if Nixon had clung to his original television strategy and not panicked; if Nixon had clung to the original Forward theme of Hall and Shepley—an interminable series of ifs can be strung together to account for, reverse or multiply the tiny margin of 112,000 popular votes by which Kennedy led Nixon. Yet when all these ifs are strung together, they are only the froth and the foam in the wake of the strategies of the two candidates who sought to lead the American people.

Last Sunday, our dear pastor informed the congregation that the peril for our community is far greater than homelessness. It’s these horrid voting requirements for colored men, only colored men. If a negro must prove his residency for three years at a freehold estate worth at least $250, how many black voters would we have left after the destruction of Seneca Village? One might say it matters little; as it stands the numbers are deplorable, merely 91 of 13,000 negro New Yorkers having the franchise. But we must start somewhere, and an appropriation of our village by the authorities would subtract 10 from that already pitiable colored voter roll. Ambrose, you voted for Senator Frémont of California, the first Republican on the presidential ticket! It may be your last chance to ever cast your ballot against slavery. Speaking of which—that defender of the curséd Fugitive Slave Act Buchanan was sworn in Wednesday! And now the Supreme Court has at long last handed down a decision for poor Mr. Dred Scott, the ramifications much worse than we had imagined. All in all, I would have to say this has been a very bad week for black folks. I can find hope only in the prospect that such severe reactionary measures may very well be evidence of the Court’s own sense of threat—that times are changing. I

Here lie men who loved America because their ancestors generations ago helped in her founding, and other men who loved her with equal passion because they themselves or their own fathers escaped from oppression to her blessed shores. Here lie officers and men, Negroes and whites, rich men and poor… together. Here are Protestants, Catholics and Jews together. Here no man prefers another because of his faith or despises him because of his color. Here there are no quotas of how many from each group are admitted or allowed. Among these men, there is no discrimination. No prejudices. No hatred. Theirs is the highest and purest democracy…. Whosoever of us lifts his hand in hate against a brother, or who thinks himself superior to those who happen to be in the minority, makes of this ceremony and the bloody sacrifice it commemorates, an empty, hollow mockery. To this, then, as our solemn duty, sacred duty do we the living now dedicate ourselves: to the right of Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, of white men and Negroes alike, to enjoy the democracy for which all of them have here paid the price. We here solemnly swear that this shall not be in vain. Out of this and from the suffering and sorrow of those who mourn this will come, we promise, the birth of a new freedom for the sons of men everywhere.

the Wilmington coup of 1898 was even mentioned— If the Wilmington massacre of 1898 was even mentioned— (how would the massacred name it?) If the Campaign for White Supremacy leading up to the 1898 elections was even mentioned in the junior-year class on the history of North Carolina, the events were described as another eruption of Negro dissatisfaction which, once expressed, quieted. But in the story of the campaign (for white supremacy), the Negro had become unruly, needed instead to be ruled once more out, “Negro rule” ousted into the swampy fantastic as fear, as specter, as a promise. The phantasm of Negro rule was what the high school textbook never acknowledged had rallied the Wilmington race (war) of 1898, the riot planned and instigated, orderly disorder, the wrong the Redeemers sought to riot up, right justifying anything, even murder, the declaration to “choke the Cape Fear River with the carcasses” of whatever the Negro populating their fantasies was—threatening and promising domination, threatening revenge, promising a North Carolina governed by the many not the few. A thousand Black rapists (each vote a thousand more) haunted the campaign the Redeemers rallied to wage. They claimed the fight to protect their honor. For, if this time they didn’t prevail, who could imagine what they would be subject to?

The crystallized opposition of the segregationists was not unexpected; but we had only dimly foreseen the resistance that came from another quarter. Victor Hugo has spoken of the "madmen of moderation" who are "un-paving hell." The descendants of Hugo's moderates appeared in the fall of 1963, bearing banners inscribed with the message: Order Before Justice. For the most part, these moderates counted themselves as friends of the civil-rights movement; certainly they were in no sense moral bedfellows of the forces of segregation and violence. But they were now wrestling with a logic that an earlier, more passive, movement had never forced them to question. They had long settled on a simple compromise, one easy to accept and to live with. They could countenance token changes, and they had always believed these would make the Negro content. They were not asking him to stay in his old ghetto. They were ready to build a brand-new ghetto for him with a small exit door for a few. But the breath of the new movement chilled them. The Negro was insisting upon the mass application of equality to jobs, housing, education and social mobility. He sought a full life for a whole people. These moderates had come some distance in step with the thundering drums, but at the point of mass application they wanted the bugle to sound a retreat.

In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character. We must begin to ask: Why are there forty million poor people in a nation overflowing with such unbelievable affluence? Why has our nation placed itself in the position of being God’s military agent on earth, and intervened recklessly in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic? Why have we substituted the arrogant undertaking of policing the whole world for the high task of putting our own house in order? All these questions remind us that there is a need for a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society. For its very survival’s sake, America must reexamine old presuppositions and release itself from many things that for centuries have been held sacred. For the evils of racism, poverty and militarism to die, a new set of values must be born. Our economy must become more person-centered than property- and profit-centered. Our government must depend more on its moral power than on its military power. Let us, therefore, not think of our movement as one that seeks to integrate the Negro into all the existing values of American society. Let us be those creative dissenters who will call our beloved nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of compassion, to a more noble expression of humaneness.

The final major area of untapped power for the Negro is in the political arena. Negro population is burgeoning in major cities as tides of migrants flow into them in search of employment and opportunity. These new migrants have substantially higher birth rates than characterize the white population. The two trends, along with the exodus of the white population to the suburbs, are producing fast-gathering Negro majorities in the large cities. The changing composition of the cities must be seen in the light of their political significance. Particularly in the North, the large cities substantially determine the political destiny of the state. These states, in turn, hold the dominating electoral votes in presidential contests. The future of the Democratic Party, which rests so heavily on its coalition of urban minorities, cannot be assessed without taking into account which way the Negro vote turns. The wistful hopes of the Republican Party for large city influence will also be decided not in the boardrooms of great corporations but in the teeming ghettos. Its 1964 disaster with Goldwater, in which fewer than 6 percent of Negroes voted Republican, indicates that the illustrious ghost of Abraham Lincoln is not sufficient for winning Negro confidence, not so long as the party fails to shrink the influence of its ultra-right wing.

To our amazement Jimmy received a letter, dated August 20, 1963, from Bertrand Russell, the world-famous philosopher and peace activist, saying “I have recently finished your remarkable book The American Resolution” and “have been greatly impressed with its power and insight.” The letter goes on to ask for Jimmy’s views on whether American whites “will understand the negro [sic] revolt because “the survival of mankind may well follow or fail to follow from political and social behavior of Americans in the next decades.” On September 5 Jimmy wrote back a lengthy reply saying among other things that “so far, with the exception of the students, there has been no social force in the white population which the Negroes can respect and a handful of liberals joining in a demonstration doesn’t change this one bit.” Russell replied on September 18 with more questions that Jimmy answered in an even longer letter dated December 22. Meanwhile, Russell had sent a telegram to the November 21 Town Hall meeting in New York City at which Jimmy was scheduled to speak, warning Negroes not to resort to violence. In response Jimmy said at the meeting that “I too would like to hope that the issues of our revolt might be resolved by peaceful means,” but “the issues and grievances were too deeply imbedded in the American system and the American peoples so that the very things Russell warned against might just have to take place if the Negroes in the U.S.A. are ever to walk the streets as free men.” In his December 22 letter Jimmy repeats what he said at the meeting and then patiently explains to Russell that what has historically been considered democracy in the United States has actually been fascism for millions of Negroes. The letter concludes: I believe that it is your responsibility as I believe that it is my responsibility to recognize and record this, so that in the future words do not confuse the struggle but help to clarify it. This is what I think philosophers should make clear. Because even though Negroes in the United States still think they are struggling for democracy, in fact democracy is what they are struggling against. This exchange between Jimmy and Russell has to be seen to be believed. In a way it epitomizes the 1960s—Jimmy Boggs, the Alabama-born autoworker, explaining the responsibility of philosophers to The Earl Russell, O.M., F.R.S., in his time probably the West’s best-known philosopher. Within the next few years The American Revolution was translated and published in French, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese. To this day it remains a page-turner for grassroots activists because it is so personal and yet political, so down to earth and yet visionary.

When Hodges was presented to Harmon the next morning for a positive ID, Harmon reportedly couldn’t be sure he was her attacker. “I can’t tell,” she said. “I can’t say he is the negro, but I can’t say he is not the negro.” Unfortunately, many citizens of Tyler subscribed to the guilty until proven innocent philosophy where African Americans were concerned. At approximately 11:15 a.m., a white mob three to four thousand strong broke into the county jail and seized Hodges. The lynch mob transported Hodges to the site of the new Smith County Courthouse, which was then under construction. A few members threw a rope up over an enormous derrick—which was being utilized at the site for hoisting large stones for the new courthouse—and fashioned a noose on one end, placing it around Hodges’s neck. Several men then took hold of the other end and, with one simultaneous pull, jerked Hodges up into the sky. Hodges squirmed as he swung back and forth high above the mob, and then his movements dwindled to a twitch or two before he grew still. Within ten minutes, the construction site was empty, save the deceased, whose gruesome figure hung motionless in midair. No one involved in the crime even attempted to conceal his identity. As the May 7, 1909 edition of the Alto Herald put it, “Those who took part in the lynching went about it just as they went about their daily business.

On the train I had a lot of time to think. I thought how in the thirty years of my life I had seldom gotten on a train in America without being conscious of my color. In the South, there are Jim Crow cars and Negroes must ride separate from the whites, usually in a filthy antiquated coach next to the engine, getting all the smoke and bumps and dirt. In the South, we cannot buy sleeping car tickets. Such comforts are only for white folks. And in the North where segregated travel is not the law, colored people have, nevertheless, many difficulties. In auto buses they must take the seats in the rear, over the wheels. On the boats they must occupy the worst cabins. The ticket agents always say that all other accommodations are sold. On trains, if one sits down by a white person, the white person will sometimes get up, flinging back an insult at the Negro who has dared to take a seat beside him. Thus it is that in America, if you are yellow, brown, or black, you can never travel anywhere without being reminded of your color, and oft-times suffering great inconveniences. I sat in the comfortable sleeping car on my first day out of Moscow and remembered many things about trips I had taken in America. I remembered how, once as a youngster going alone to see my father who was working in Mexico, I went into the dining car of the train to eat. I sat down at a table with a white man. The man looked at me and said, "You're a nigger, ain't you?" and left the table. It was beneath his dignity to eat with a Negro child. At St. Louis I went onto the station platform to buy a glass of milk. The clerk behind the counter said, “We don't serve niggers," and refused to sell me anything. As I grew older I learned to expect this often when traveling. So when I went South to lecture on my poetry at Negro universities, I carried my own food because I knew I could not go into the dining cars. Once from Washington to New Orleans, I lived all the way on the train on cold food. I remembered this miserable trip as I sat eating a hot dinner on the diner of the Moscow-Tashkent express. Traveling South from New York, at Washington, the capital of our country, the official Jim Crow begins. There the conductor comes through the train and, if you are a Negro, touches you on the shoulder and says, "The last coach forward is the car for colored people." Then you must move your baggage and yourself up near the engine, because when the train crosses the Potomac River into Virginia, and the dome of the Capitol disappears, it is illegal any longer for white people and colored people to ride together. (Or to eat together, or sleep together, or in some places even to work together.) Now I am riding South from Moscow and am not Jim-Crowed, and none of the darker people on the train with me are Jim-Crowed, so I make a happy mental note in the back of my mind to write home to the Negro papers: "There is no Jim Crow on the trains of the Soviet Union.

The fact that virtually all of the nation’s new housing was built in the white, de-ethnicized suburbs during this period of time meant that the only real area of expansion for black housing was housing already inhabited by “whites,” which is to say ethnics living in the cities. By forcing the emptying of ethnic neighborhoods, Louis Wirth’s system killed two birds with one stone: it opened up new areas for black migration and at the same time it broke up the suspect ethnic neighborhoods by driving their inhabitants to the suburbs, where they were assimilated. Solving the race problem in housing meant breaking up those neighborhoods and making them available to racial minorities who were not welcome in the neighborhood precisely because of their ethnicity. At some point in the period under discussion, it became obvious that “integration” was nothing more than an unattainable ideal or a meaningless fiction. The system of social engineering that was erected in this country after the war needed that fiction as justification for a housing policy which was ultimately segregationist in intent. The system involved allowing ethnic neighborhoods, “areas now inhabited by whites” to “be made available for Negroes.” The dispossessed white ethnics would then be driven to the suburbs where they were “Americanized” according to class — each suburb would be segmented according to price — and absorbed into the mainstream of American life, which is to say, subjected to the controls imposed by media culture and the car.

1953. It was a world with a war that had just ended and, like a devil that grows a new tail after you’ve chopped one off, another war had begun. With a draft and an enemy just like the one before, only this time there were nuclear weapons; there were veterans’ cemeteries that refused to bury Negro soldiers; there was a government telling you what to look for in a nuclear flash, what kind of structure to hide under should the sirens start wailing—though they must have known that it would have been madness to look or hide or consider anything except lying down and taking your death in with one full breath. There were the subcommittee hearings with Sheedy asking McLain on TV, “Are you a red?” whereupon McLain threw water into his face, and Sheedy threw water back and knocked off his glasses. A world in which TV stations were asked to segregate characters on their shows for Southern viewers, in which all nudes were withdrawn from a San Francisco art show because “local mother Mrs. Hutchins’s sensibilities are shaken to the core;” and beautiful Angel Island became a guided missile station, and a white college student was expelled for proposing to a Negro, and they were rioting against us in Trieste; the Allies freed Trieste not many years ago, and suddenly they hated us … and hovering above all this, every day in the paper, that newsprint visage like the snapshot of a bland Prometheus: Ethel Rosenberg’s face. When would the all clear come? Didn’t somebody promise us an all clear if we were good, and clean, and nice,

The Covid-19 pandemic has made it clear that by several measures, the health status of Black Americans is on par with that of people living in far poorer nations, and that at every stage of life Black Americans have poorer health outcomes than white Americans and even, in most cases, than other ethnic groups. Racial health disparities show up at the beginning of life and cut lives short at the end. Black babies are more than twice as likely as white babies to die at birth or in the first year of life—a racial gap that adds up to thousands of lost lives every year.13 African American adults of all ages have elevated rates of conditions such as diabetes and hypertension that among white people are found more commonly at older ages. In the first half of 2020, owing to the pandemic, the Black-white gap in life expectancy increased to six years, from four in 2019.14 This inequality when it comes to the health of Black people’s bodies is rooted in false ideas about racial differences, developed and spread during slavery, and long challenged by Black medical practitioners and scholars, that still inform the way medical treatment is administered in America.15 To understand the racial divide in the health of our nation that was stripped bare by Covid-19, we must examine the roots of these myths. — In the 1787 manual A Treatise on Tropical Diseases; and on the Climate of the West-Indies, a British doctor, Benjamin Moseley, claimed that Black people could bear surgical operations much more easily than white people, noting that “what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.

Ever since the birth of our nation, white America has had a schizophrenic personality on the question of race. She has been torn between selves—a self in which she proudly professed the great principles of democracy and a self in which she sadly practiced the antithesis of democracy. This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backward simultaneously with every step forward on the question of racial justice, to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him. There has never been a solid, unified and determined thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans. The step backward has a new name today. It is called the “white backlash.” But the white backlash is nothing new. It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there. It was caused neither by the cry of Black Power nor by the unfortunate recent wave of riots in our cities. The white backlash of today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation. The white backlash is an expression of the same vacillations, the same search for rationalizations, the same lack of commitment that have always characterized white America on the question of race. What is the source of this perennial indecision and vacillation? It lies in the “congenital deformity” of racism that has crippled the nation from its inception. The roots of racism are very deep in America. Historically it was so acceptable in the national life that today it still only lightly burdens the conscience.

Instead there was a rush on me of people having to have immediate action; some hand-hacked old kitchen stiff as thickened with grease as a miner or sandhog would be with clay, wanting me to go and see his boss, subito; or an Indian would bring his grievances written in a poem on a paper bag soaked with doughnut oil.[….] There were Greek and Negro chambermaids from all the hotels, porters, doormen, checkroom attendants, waitresses, specialists [….]. All kinds were coming. The humanity of the under-galleries of pipes, storage, and coal made an appearance, maintenance men, short-order grovelers; or a ducal Frenchman, in homburg, like a singer, calling himself “the beauty cook,” who wrote down on his card without taking off his gloves. And then old snowbirds and white hound-looking faces, guys with Wobbly cards from an earlier time, old Bohunk women with letters explaining what was wanted, and all varieties of assaulted kissers, infirmity, drunkenness, dazedness, innocence, limping, crawling, insanity, prejudice, and from downright leprosy the whole way again to the most vigorous straight- backed beauty. So if this collection of people has nothing in common with what would have brought up the back of a Xerxes’ army or a Constantine’s, new things have been formed; but what struck me in them was a feeling of antiquity and thick crust. But I expect happiness and gladness have always been the same, so how much variation should there be in their opposite? Dealing with them, signing them into the organization and explaining what to expect, wasn’t all generous kindness. In large part it was rough, when I wanted to get out of the way. The demand was that fierce, the idea having gotten around that it was a judgment hour, that they wanted to pull you from your clerical side of the desk to go with them.

This past, the Negro's past, of rope, fire torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for this women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred, and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible - this past, this endless struggle to achieve and reveal and confirm a human identity, human authority, yet contains, for all its horror, something very beautiful. I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering - enough is certainly as good as a feast - but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth - and indeed, no church - can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakable. This is because, in order to save his life, he is forced to look beneath appearances, to take nothing for granted, to hear the meaning behind the words. If one is continually surviving the worst that life can bring, one eventually ceases to be controlled by a fear of what life can bring; whatever it brings must be borne. And at this level of experience one's bitterness begins to be palatable, and hatred becomes too heavy a sack to carry. The apprehension of life here so briefly and inadequately sketched has been the experience of generations of Negroes, and it helps to explain how they have endured and how they have been able to produce children of kindergarten age who can walk through mobs to get to school. It demands great force and great cunning continually to assault the mighty and indifferent fortress of white supremacy, as Negroes in this country have done so long. It demands great spiritual resilience not to hate the hater whose foot is on your neck, and even greater miracle of perception and charity not to teach your child to hate. The Negro boys and girls who are facing mobs today come out of a long line of improbable aristocrats - the only genuine aristocrats this country has produced. I say "this country" because their frame of reference was totally American. They were hewing out of the mountain of white supremacy the stone of their individuality. I have great respect for that unsung army of black men and women who trudged down back lanes and entered back doors, saying "Yes, sir" and "No, Ma'am" in order to acquire a new roof for the schoolhouse, new books, a new chemistry lab, more beds for the dormitories, more dormitories. They did not like saying "Yes, sir" and "No Ma'am", but the country was in no hurry to educate Negroes, these black men and women knew that the job had to be done, and they put their pride in their pockets in order to do it. It is very hard to believe that they were in anyway inferior to the white men and women who opened those back doors. It is very hard to believe that those men and women, raising their children, eating their greens, crying their curses, weeping their tears, singing their songs, making their love, as the sun rose, as the sun set, were in any way inferior to the white men and women who crept over to share these splendors after the sun went down. ... I am proud of these people not because of their color but because of their intelligence and their spiritual force and their beauty. The country should be proud of them, too, but, alas, not many people in this country even know of their existence.

The Negro had never really been patient in the pure sense of the word. The posture of silent waiting was forced upon him psychologically because he was shackled physically. In the days of slavery, this suppression was openly, scientifically and consistently applied. Sheer physical force kept the Negro captive at every point. He was prevented from learning to read and write, prevented by laws actually inscribed in the statute books. He was forbidden to associate with other Negroes living on the same plantation, except when weddings or funerals took place. Punishment for any form of resistance or complaint about his condition could range from mutilation to death. Families were torn apart, friends separated, cooperation to improve their condition carefully thwarted. Fathers and mothers were sold from their children and children were bargained away from their parents. Young girls were, in many cases, sold to become the breeders of fresh generations of slaves. The slaveholders of America had devised with almost scientific precision their systems for keeping the Negro defenseless, emotionally and physically. With the ending of physical slavery after the Civil War, new devices were found to "keep the Negro in his place." It would take volumes to describe these methods, extending from birth in jim-crow hospitals through burial in jim-crow sections of cemeteries. They are too well known to require a catalogue here. Yet one of the revelations during the past few years is the fact that the straitjackets of race prejudice and discrimination do not wear only southern labels. The subtle, psychological technique of the North has approached in its ugliness and victimization of the Negro the outright terror and open brutality of the South. The result has been a demeanor that passed for patience in the eyes of the white man, but covered a powerful impatience in the heart of the Negro.

It is, in short, the growing conviction that the Negroes cannot win—a conviction with much grounding in experience—which accounts for the new popularity of black power. So far as the ghetto Negro is concerned, this conviction expresses itself in hostility, first toward the people closest to him who have held out the most promise and failed to deliver (Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, etc.), then toward those who have proclaimed themselves his friends (the liberals and the labor movement), and finally toward the only oppressors he can see (the local storekeeper and the policeman on the corner). On the leadership level, the conviction that the Negroes cannot win takes other forms, principally the adoption of what I have called a "no-win" policy. Why bother with programs when their enactment results only in sham? Why concern ourselves with the image of the movement when nothing significant has been gained for all the sacrifices made by SNCC and CORE? Why compromise with reluctant white allies when nothing of consequence can be achieved anyway? Why indeed have anything to do with whites at all? On this last point, it is extremely important for white liberals to understand what, one gathers from their references to "racism in reverse," the President and the Vice-President of the United States do not: that there is all the difference in the world between saying, "If you don't want me, I don't want you" (which is what some proponents of black power have in effect been saying), and the statement, "Whatever you do, I don't want you" (which is what racism declares). It is, in other words, both absurd and immoral to equate the despairing response of the victim with the contemptuous assertion of the oppressor. It would, moreover, be tragic if white liberals allowed verbal hostility on the part of Negroes to drive them out of the movement or to curtail their support for civil rights. The issue was injustice before black power became popular, and the issue is still injustice.

Everything has already been caught, until my death, in an icefloe of being: my trembling when a piece of rough trade asks me to brown him (I discover that his desire is his trembling) during a Carnival night; at twilight, the view from a sand dune of Arab warriors surrendering to French generals; the back of my hand placed on a soldier's basket, but especially the sly way in which the soldier looked at it; suddenly I see the ocean between two houses in Biarritz; I am escaping from the reformatory, taking tiny steps, frightened not at the idea of being caught but of being the prey of freedom; straddling the enormous prick of a blond legionnaire, I am carried twenty yards along the ramparts; not the handsome football player, nor his foot, nor his shoe, but the ball, then ceasing to be the ball and becoming the “kick-off,” and I cease being that to become the idea that goes from the foot to the ball; in a cell, unknown thieves call me Jean; when at night I walk barefoot in my sandals across fields of snow at the Austrian border, I shall not flinch, but then, I say to myself, this painful moment must concur with the beauty of my life, I refuse to let this moment and all the others be waste matter; using their suffering, I project myself to the mind's heaven. Some negroes are giving me food on the Bordeaux docks; a distinguished poet raises my hands to his forehead; a German soldier is killed in the Russian snows and his brother writes to inform me; a boy from Toulouse helps me ransack the rooms of the commissioned and non-commissioned officers of my regiment in Brest: he dies in prison; I am talking of someone–and while doing so, the time to smell roses, to hear one evening in prison the gang bound for the penal colony singing, to fall in love with a white-gloved acrobat–dead since the beginning of time, that is, fixed, for I refuse to live for any other end than the very one which I found to contain the first misfortune: that my life must be a legend, in other words, legible, and the reading of it must give birth to a certain new emotion which I call poetry. I am no longer anything, only a pretext.

The great masses, he wrote in Mein Kampf, “will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one, since they themselves perhaps also lie sometimes in little things, but would certainly still be too much ashamed of too great lies. Thus, such an untruth will not at all enter their heads, and therefore they will be unable to believe in the possibility of the enormous impudence of the most infamous distortion in others.” Hitler’s lies spread misinformation that was favorable to Germany and unfavorable to us and our allies, and sowed dissension among the American public not just about the war effort but about our own basic system of government. His very well-funded propaganda mission in the United States was twofold: to try to keep the United States from getting into World War II, and also to soften us up, to mess with us, to make us less effective as a country, by finding and exploiting what the Germans called “kernels of disturbance” in the United States. The German propaganda operation in America, according to the first U.S. academic study on the topic, identified these kernels of disturbance as “racial controversies, economic inequalities, petty jealousies in public life,” and “differences of opinion which divide political parties and minority groups.” Even the “frustrated ambitions of discarded politicians.” Germany’s agents were tasked with finding these fissures in American society and then prying them further apart, exploiting them to make Americans hate and suspect each other, and maybe even wish for a new kind of country altogether. A partisan, bickering, demoralized America, the Nazis believed, would be incapable of mounting a successful war effort in Europe. It might even soften us up for an eventual takeover. Hitler was counting above all on racism and religious bigotry to carry the day in the United States, and to set the stage for global domination. “The wholesome aversion for the Negroes and the colored races in general, including the Jews, the existence of popular justice [lynching]…scholars who have studied immigration and gained an insight, by means of intelligence tests, into the inequality of the races—all these strains are an assurance that the sound elements of the United States will one day awaken as they have awakened in Germany,” Hitler said.

The liberal notion that more government programs can solve racial problems is simplistic—precisely because it focuses solely on the economic dimension. And the conservative idea that what is needed is a change in the moral behavior of poor black urban dwellers (especially poor black men, who, they say, should stay married, support their children, and stop committing so much crime) highlights immoral actions while ignoring public responsibility for the immoral circumstances that haunt our fellow citizens. The common denominator of these views of race is that each still sees black people as a “problem people,” in the words of Dorothy I. Height, president of the National Council of Negro Women, rather than as fellow American citizens with problems. Her words echo the poignant “unasked question” of W. E. B. Du Bois, who, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), wrote: They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town.… Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At these I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. Nearly a century later, we confine discussions about race in America to the “problems” black people pose for whites rather than consider what this way of viewing black people reveals about us as a nation. This paralyzing framework encourages liberals to relieve their guilty consciences by supporting public funds directed at “the problems”; but at the same time, reluctant to exercise principled criticism of black people, liberals deny them the freedom to err. Similarly, conservatives blame the “problems” on black people themselves—and thereby render black social misery invisible or unworthy of public attention. Hence, for liberals, black people are to be “included” and “integrated” into “our” society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be “well behaved” and “worthy of acceptance” by “our” way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitutive elements of that life.

As the reach of the 1619 Project grew, so did the backlash. A small group of historians publicly attempted to discredit the project by challenging its historical interpretations and pointing to what they said were historical errors. They did not agree with our framing, which treated slavery and anti-Blackness as foundational to America. They did not like our assertion that Black Americans have served as this nation’s most ardent freedom fighters and have waged their battles mostly alone, or the idea that so much of modern American life has been shaped not by the majestic ideals of our founding but by its grave hypocrisy. And they especially did not like a paragraph I wrote about the motivations of the colonists who declared independence from Britain. “Conveniently left out of our founding mythology,” that paragraph began, “is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” Later, in response to other scholars who believed we hadn’t been specific enough and to clarify that this sentence had never been meant to imply that every single colonist shared this motivation, we changed the sentence to read “some of the colonists.” But that mattered little to some of our critics. The linking of slavery and the American Revolution directly challenged the cornerstone of national identity embedded in our public history, the narratives taught to us in elementary schools, museums and memorials, Hollywood movies, and in many scholarly works as well.16 The assertions about the role slavery played in the American Revolution shocked many of our readers. But these assertions came directly from academic historians who had been making this argument for decades. Plainly, the historical ideas and arguments in the 1619 Project were not new.17 We based them on the wealth of scholarship that has redefined the field of American history since at least the 1960s, including Benjamin Quarles’s landmark book The Negro in the American Revolution, first published in 1961; Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877; Annette Gordon-Reed’s The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family; and Alan Taylor’s The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832. What seemed to provoke so much ire was that we had breached the wall between academic history and popular understanding, and we had done so in The New York Times, the paper of record, in a major multimedia project led by a Black

The U.S. father of colorism is Samuel Stanhope Smith, a longtime theologian who taught at and then presided over Princeton University in early America. In early 1787, the young Princeton professor gave the annual oration to the new nation’s most distinguished scholarly group, the American Philosophical Society. He spoke before the White men who wrote the U.S. Constitution that year, pledging to use “the genuine light of truth.” Smith’s racist light: “domestic servants…who remain near the [White] persons” have “advanced far before the others in acquiring the regular and agreeable features.” Since “field slaves” live “remote from…their superiors,” their bodies “are, generally, ill shaped,” and their kinky hair is “the farthest removed from the ordinary laws of nature.” In an 1850 book, Peter Browne leaned on his unrivaled human-hair collection to classify the “hair” of Whites and “wool” of Blacks, to swear, “The hair of the white man is more perfect than that of the Negro.

As early as 1793, a White minister protested that “a Negro hut” had depreciated property values in Salem. Similar protests surfaced in New Haven and Indiana, and they had become commonplace in Boston by the time Garrison settled there. The vicious housing cycle had already begun. Racist policies harmed Black neighborhoods, generating racist ideas that caused people not to want to live next to Blacks, which depressed the value of Black homes, which caused people not to want to live in Black neighborhoods even more, owing to low property values.

Maturity sees that the past is not to be rejected, destroyed, or replaced, but rather that it is to be judged and corrected, that the work of judgment and correction is endless, and that it necessarily involves one's own past. The industrial economy has made a general principle of the youthful antipathy to the past, and the modern world abounds with heralds of "a better future" and with debunkers happy to point out that Yeast was "silly like us" or that Thomas Jefferson may have had a Negro slave as a mistress - and so we are disencumbered of the burden of great lives, set free to be as cynical or desperate as we please. Cultural forms, it is held, should change apace to keep up with technology. Sexual discipline should be replaced by the chemicals, devices, and procedures of "birth control," and poetry must hasten to accept the influence of typewriter or computer. It can be better argued that cultural forms ought to change by analogy with biological forms. I assume that they do change in that way, and by the same necessity to respond to changes of circumstance. It is necessary, nevertheless, to recognize a difference in kinds of cultural change: there is change by necessity, or adaptation; and there is contrived change, or novelty. The first is the work of species or communities or lineages of descent, occurring usually by slow increments over a long time. The second is the work of individual minds, and it happens, or is intended to happen, by fiat. Individual attempts to change cultural form - as to make a new kind of marriage or family or community - are nearly always shallow or foolish and are frequently totalitarian. The assumption that it can easily be otherwise comes from the faith in genius. To adopt a communal form with the idea of chain or discarding it according to individual judgment is hopeless, the despair and death of meaning. To keep the form is an act of faith in possibility, not of the form, but of the life that is given to it; the form is a question addressed to life and time, which only life and time can answer. Individual genius, then, goes astray when it proposes to do the work of community. We rightly follow its promptings, on the other hand, when it can point out correctly that we have gone astray - when forms have become rigid or empty, when we have forgot their use or their meaning. We then follow our genius or our geniuses back to reverence, to truth, or to nature. This alternation is one of the long rhythms. But the faith in genius and the rebellions of genius, at the times when thee are necessary, should lead to the renewal of forms, not to their destruction.

There exists today a dangerous relationship between the extreme left and the extreme right, and between black rage and white fear. The confrontation tactics of the one evoke a reactionary response from the other. When the would-be revolutionaries of the new left manhandle professors, occupy buildings, and destroy property, the right wins new adherents. When sincere but misdirected young black people engage in violence in the name of justice, they are strengthening those very forces which in the past have inflicted violence and injustice upon the Negro community. Such acts of protest may be cathartic, may appear to be bold and militant; but let us be very clear--their primary effect is to bring about a political reaction. These acts have set loose a wave of panic in this country, and opportunistic right-wing demagogues understand the nature of that panic and are building their political futures upon it. These demagogues do not believe in meeting the black community's urgent needs for income and education. Indeed, social justice, by removing the cause of social unrest, would threaten the very base of fear upon which they stand. Their program is the billy club and their staunchest ally the police arm of the state. They believe in repression. The lessons of these recent developments should be clear. An assault upon our democratic institutions will not reform them but destroy them. Violence will lead to more violence, not to social justice. And the fundamental tragedy is that the absence of justice will provoke more people to engage in violent acts. We must find a way out of this vicious cycle.

The Negro struggle has hardly run its course; and it will not stop moving until it has been utterly defeated or won substantial equality. But I fail to see how the movement can be victorious in the absence of radical programs for full employment, the abolition of slums, the reconstruction of our educational system, new definitions of work and leisure. Adding up the cost of such programs, we can only conclude that we are talking about a refashioning of our political economy.

was waiting, silently waiting, not so much for my actual death, which meant little to me, one way or the other, as for the pine box that contained my bones to be carried three thousand miles from the hills of California back along the railroad lines to my family’s house and farm in the Adirondack mountain village of North Elba, New York. To the place that, because of the Negroes living there, we called Timbuctoo. A letter from a distinguished woman in the East who had long

There is, as well, a tactical side to the new emphasis on self-defense and the suggestion that nonviolence be abandoned. The reasoning here is that turning the other cheek is not the way to win respect, and that only if the Negro succeeds in frightening the white man will the white man begin taking him seriously. The trouble with this reasoning is that it fails to recognize that fear is more likely to bring hostility to the surface than respect. Far from prodding the "white power structure" into action, the new militant leadership, by raising the slogan of black power and lowering the banner of nonviolence, has obscured the moral issue facing this nation, and permitted the President and Vice-President to lecture us about "racism in reverse" instead of proposing more meaningful programs for dealing with the problems of unemployment, housing, and education.

As one political insider explained, Reagan’s appeal derived primarily from the ideological fervor of the right wing of the Republican Party and “the emotional distress of those who fear or resent the Negro, and who expect Reagan somehow to keep him ‘in his place’ or at least echo their own anger and frustration.”66 To great effect, Reagan echoed white frustration in race-neutral terms through implicit racial appeals. His

Warren Weaver, a New York Times journalist who reviewed the book upon its release, observed that Phillips’s strategy largely depended upon creating and maintaining a racially polarized political environment. “Full racial polarization is an essential ingredient of Phillips’s political pragmatism. He wants to see a black Democratic party, particularly in the South, because this will drive into the Republican party precisely the kind of anti-Negro whites who will help constitute the emerging majority. This even leads him to support some civil rights efforts.”56 Appealing to the racism and vulnerability of working-class whites had worked to defeat the Populists at the turn of the century, and a growing number of conservatives believed the tactic should be employed again, albeit in a more subtle fashion.

Together with a number of Negro and white reporters, I attended [Martin Luther] King's packed church. He spoke simply, emphasizing the nonviolent nature of the struggle, and told his congregation: "We are concerned not merely to win justice in the buses but rather to behave in a new and different way--to be nonviolent so that we may remove injustice itself, both from society and from ourselves. This is a struggle which we cannot lose, no matter what the apparent outcome, if we ourselves succeed in becoming better and more loving people.

Over the next few years, the number of African Americans seeking jobs and homes in and near Palo Alto grew, but no developer who depended on federal government loan insurance would sell to them, and no California state-licensed real estate agent would show them houses. But then, in 1954, one resident of a whites-only area in East Palo Alto, across a highway from the Stanford campus, sold his house to a black family. Almost immediately Floyd Lowe, president of the California Real Estate Association, set up an office in East Palo Alto to panic white families into listing their homes for sale, a practice known as blockbusting. He and other agents warned that a 'Negro invasion' was imminent and that it would result in collapsing property values. Soon, growing numbers of white owners succumbed to the scaremongering and sold at discounted prices to the agents and their speculators. The agents, including Lowe himself, then designed display ads with banner headlines-"Colored Buyers!"-which they ran in San Francisco newspapers. African Americans desperate for housing, purchased the homes at inflated prices. Within a three-month period, one agent alone sold sixty previously white-owned properties to African Americans. The California real estate commissioner refused to take any action, asserting that while regulations prohibited licensed agents from engaging in 'unethical practices,' the exploitation of racial fear was not within the real estate commission's jurisdiction. Although the local real estate board would ordinarily 'blackball' any agent who sold to a nonwhite buyer in the city's white neighborhoods (thereby denying the agent access to the multiple listing service upon which his or her business depended), once wholesale blockbusting began, the board was unconcerned, even supportive. At the time, the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration not only refused to insure mortgages for African Americans in designated white neighborhoods like Ladera; they also would not insure mortgages for whites in a neighborhood where African Americans were present. So once East Palo Alto was integrated, whites wanting to move into the area could no longer obtain government-insured mortgages. State-regulated insurance companies, like the Equitable Life Insurance Company and the Prudential Life Insurance Company, also declared that their policy was not to issue mortgages to whites in integrated neighborhoods. State insurance regulators had no objection to this stance. The Bank of America and other leading California banks had similar policies, also with the consent of federal banking regulators. Within six years the population of East Palo Alto was 82 percent black. Conditions deteriorated as African Americans who had been excluded from other neighborhoods doubled up in single-family homes. Their East Palo Alto houses had been priced so much higher than similar properties for whites that the owners had difficulty making payments without additional rental income. Federal and state hosing policy had created a slum in East Palo Alto. With the increased density of the area, the school district could no longer accommodate all Palo Alto students, so in 1958 it proposed to create a second high school to accommodate teh expanding student population. The district decided to construct the new school in the heart of what had become the East Palo Alto ghetto, so black students in Palo Alto's existing integrated building would have to withdraw, creating a segregated African American school in the eastern section and a white one to the west. the board ignored pleas of African American and liberal white activists that it draw an east-west school boundary to establish two integrated secondary schools. In ways like these, federal, state, and local governments purposely created segregation in every metropolitan area of the nation.

In elite White circles, Du Bois became known as one of those “half dozen Negroes” who had allowed Harvard “to make a man out of semi-beast,” as New Yorker Franklin Delano Roosevelt exulted as a Harvard freshman in 1903.

Imperial domination spread. Slaves were the precious life-blood of the West Indian economy, where King Sugar reigned and in which £70 million had been invested by 1790. Under the asiento, British slave-traders transported a million and a half Africans to the Caribbean during the century: ‘All this great increase in our treasure,’ wrote Joshua Gee in 1729, ‘proceeds chiefly from the labour of negroes in the plantations.’ West African gold gave England the guinea. In 1787, Sierra Leone in West Africa was set up as a trial settlement of free blacks, as was New South Wales from 1788 for transported criminal whites. The future of English society was irreversibly being skewed by empire.

Across the United States, there are more than seventeen hundred monuments to the Confederacy, monuments to a breakaway republic whose constitution and leaders were unequivocal in declaring the purpose of their new nation. “Its foundations are laid,” said Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, “its corner-stone rests upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth….With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature, or by the curse against Canaan, is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system.

President Roosevelt had said and done great things to get America back on track after the Depression. He had even spearheaded the New Deal, but it seemed like Negroes were getting the same Old Deal. When President Truman desegregated the armed forces, Frank like so many other black veterans, hoped that other changes were coming. But America took Negro taxes and didn't put the dollars back into Negro communities. It was nothing but a rape and pillage of the Negro people, and he hated it.

In 1950 there would be 31,707 male lawers in New York State. There would be 1,275 female lawyers in New York State. There would be 19 Negro women lawyers in New York State. Put otherwise, black women constituted about 6 10,000ths (0.06%) of all the state's layers. A proportion so small that it is less a minority than a rounding error.

And if the white people don’t stand with the Negroes as they go out now, then there will be a danger that after the Negroes get something they’ll say, ‘Okay, we got this by ourselves.’ And the only way you can break that down is to have white people working alongside of you—so then it changes the whole complexion of what you’re doing, so it isn’t any longer Negro fighting white, it’s a question of rational people against irrational people.”89 The civil rights movement needed to foster this new reality, to seek, as Moses said, a “broader identification, identification with individuals that are going through the same kind of struggle, so that the struggle doesn’t remain just a question of racial struggle.” Moses also invoked the vision of the beloved community, the ideal of a universal brotherhood and sisterhood of humankind, which Martin Luther King, Jr. had eloquently proclaimed in his recent sermons.90 Moses’s position was principled and philosophical and ultimately more persuasive.

Racial socialization took place in schools and society, whether done explicitly or not. The prevalence of antiblackness in US popular culture and school content made it necessary to offer purposeful and humanizing perspectives on blackness to support the healthy development of black student identities. The learning aesthetic offered through Woodson’s program presented resources that supported the development of student identities that were historically grounded, aware of their oppression, and committed to imagining and building new possibilities for their collective futures. It was enacted discursively through curriculum development, materially through decorative educational resources produced for classrooms and schools, and affectively through performances and dramatizations during Negro History Week celebrations and classroom activities. This aesthetic presented new symbols of being and belonging that were distinct to black students, all of which offered explicit critiques of the master narrative about black life shaping their Jim Crow surroundings.

MURRAY CONTINUED TO RAISE the issue of sex discrimination in her writings and presentations to academic and civic groups. On June 19, 1970, at a hearing held by the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor, she described the multilayered discrimination black women faced, using an impressive array of charts to compare salary and unemployment rates by race, sex, and age to supplement her testimony. From her days as a restaurant worker in college to her career as an attorney and educa-tor, she had been paid less than, and denied the respect accorded to, her male peers. She had spent the first half of her life fighting for equal rights as an African American, only to discover that she would have to spend the second half fighting for equal rights as a woman. 'If anyone should ask a Negro woman what is her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be,' Murray told the committee, her voice laden with emotion, 'I survived.' Three months later, she would testify before the New York City Commission on Human Rights, headed by fellow Yale Law School alumna Eleanor Holmes Norton. Unable to hold back the tears, Murray openly wept as she recounted the opportunities she had been denied.

While all this was occurring, elsewhere about the Republic celebrators of the Fourth suffered shattered fingers, wounded heads, and blinded eyes from excessive use of fireworks. In New York City, eighty-eight conflagrations were started by fireworks. In Montgomery, Alabama, the first Confederate capital, thirteen guns were fired in salute to the reunited nation; in Richmond, Virginia, the second Confederate capital, flags of the United States and Virginia were hoisted together for the first time since 1860. In New Orleans, parades and rhetorical exercises honored the day, but in Charleston, South Carolina, only the Negroes celebrated. An attempt was made in Oronogo, Missouri, to raise the Confederate flag, but an opposing party gathered and threatened to shoot the perpetrators of the deed. In Lawrenceburg, Kentucky, the Confederate flag and a banner bearing the names of the Democratic party’s candidates for President and Vice-President, Tilden and Hendricks, were suspended from the dome of the county courthouse. In Wyoming, ranchers heard rumors from friendly Indians that General Custer had suffered a great defeat north of Powder River, but none believed the story. Late in the day, a Helena, Montana, newspaper received a brief dispatch dated July 2 from Stillwater: “Muggins Taylor, a scout from General Gibbon, arrived here last night from Little Horn River and reports that Gen. Custer found the Indian camp of 2,000 lodges on the Little Horn and immediately attacked it. He charged the thickest portion of the camp with five companies … The Indians poured a murderous fire from all directions, Gen. Custer, his two brothers, his nephew, and brother-in-law were all killed, and not one of the detachment escaped.

North and a South: two political aliens existing in a Union imperfectly defined as a confederation of States.” In Pollard’s formulation, the Lost Cause was both justified and enduring: It was not dead, but alive. The foe now was central authority and national will—Washington, D.C., writ large. “The people of the South have surrendered in the war what the war has conquered”—slavery and secession—“but they cannot be expected to give up what was not involved in the war, and voluntarily abandon their political schools for the dogma of Consolidation.” Pollard declared that a “ ‘war of ideas,’ ” a new war that “the South wants and insists upon perpetrating,” was under way. “The war has left the South its own memories, its own heroes, its own tears, its own dead,” Pollard wrote. “Under these traditions, sons will grow to manhood, and lessons sink deep that are learned from the lips of widowed mothers.” It was a bold call to fight on in the face of loss. The war, Pollard wrote, “did not decide negro equality; it did not decide negro suffrage; it did not decide State Rights….And these things which the war did not decide, the Southern people will still cling to, still claim, and still assert them in their rights and views.” He enlarged upon this thesis in another book, The Lost Cause Regained, published in 1868. Pollard wrote that he was “profoundly convinced that the true cause fought for in the late war has not been ‘lost’ immeasurably or irrevocably, but is yet in a condition to be ‘regained’ by the South on ultimate issues of the political contest.” The question was no longer slavery, but white supremacy, which Pollard described as the “true cause of the war” and the “true hope of the South.” The reassertion of states’ rights and the rejection of federal rule was a holy cause. Likening the lot of the Southerner to that of Christ himself, Pollard spoke in terms religiously inclined Southerners—which was to say most Southerners—could understand, calling on the defeated Confederates to be patient in the tribulation of Reconstruction. The South, Pollard wrote, “must wear the crown of thorns before she can assume that of victory.” The blood of their brothers and the faith of their fathers had consecrated a postwar Southern path. There was to be only limited accommodation to the will of the majority. Though the North had triumphed on the field of battle, the South, anxious about ceding control of their particular affairs

The fight against the Klan is not a Jewish fight or a Negro’s fight or a Catholic’s fight, but an American fight.” Within a few weeks, community leaders from all three camps had signed on, opening a new office of the American Unity League—an Indiana foothold inside the Klan of the North.

And how about the old proverb?’ remarked the old Prince, who had long been listening to the conversation with a humorous twinkle in his small glittering eyes. ‘My daughters won’t mind my mentioning it. Women’s hair is long, but their wits. ...’37 ‘They thought the same of the negroes before their emancipation,’ said Pestsov angrily. ‘The thing that seems strange to me is that women should look for new duties,’ said Koznyshev, ‘while, as we see, men unfortunately generally avoid theirs.

That self-confidence only blossomed into full-blown delusion as I got older. Eventually, the braids were replaced by a bob cut with bangs that had the presence Tina Yothers’s bangs did at her peak during Family Ties. Wait till these white boys at my new school get a whiff of me, I’d tell myself as I got dressed in the morning. Oh, they definitely did. And if Calvin Klein were to bottle that odor, it would have been called: Eau de Weary Grandmother at Post Office Who Hums a Negro Spiritual Parfum. Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? To make matters worse, I often paired my asexual hairdo with lived-in black dress shoes, pleated khakis, and a primary-colored turtleneck from Eddie Bauer. At best, this outfit could be described as “Jehovah Witness Chic,” and at worst, “recent Heaven’s Gate defector.” This, my friends, was the milk shake that did not bring all the boys to the yard. It was the milk shake that made them go, “You know, I’m really not into dairy right now.

As in most Northern cities fielding black migrants, housing remained a pernicious obstacle in the 1950s. Suburban tracts constructed on a vast scale for soldiers returning from World War II—and backed by Federal Housing Administration (FHA) grants—were generally closed to Negro veterans. “Restrictive covenants” limited ownership to whites only, including recent immigrants from Europe. In developments like the 17,000 tract houses of Levittown, built on Long Island between 1947 and 1951, federally subsidized housing generated equity wealth and spawned a new generation of white middle-class Americans. Shut out of Levittown—the prototype for postwar suburbia—and other such developments for decades, Negro veterans were belatedly granted lesser subsidies for scatter-site housing in generally depressed areas. Moreover, the government subsidized public housing for Negroes that were not owner-occupied—like the homes for whites in suburbia—but rented to low-income families in inner-city areas. These federally backed housing projects capped family earning for eligibility at little more than minimum wage. The U.S. government essentially ran a two-tier program, encouraging a permanent Negro underclass of renters while operating the FHA-backed suburban home ownership program to stimulate a dramatic growth of the white middle class.

Their subsequent journey to Europe took them to New York City, where they boarded a converted passenger liner and set off on a harrowing trip across the North Atlantic, during which German U-boats hunted for ships just like theirs. Finally, they landed in Britain, where, to their delight, they were welcomed by people who had never heard of segregation. The freedoms they experienced there were life-changing. In villages in Wales and Oxfordshire, they lifted pints in pubs alongside white men for the first time and danced with white girls. This warm welcome infuriated many white American soldiers, particularly southern ones, who tried, and failed, to poison the Britons against the “Negroes.

In the new millennium, there is All Lives Matter and the more absurd Blue Lives Matter, anti-black counter-slogans that nonetheless cannot escape the rhetorical world black people made. Indeed, as scholars P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods have observed, “The meme has become a political Rorschach producing a cornucopia of identitarian hashtags . . . that, at the end of the day, effortlessly obscures or subsumes blackness’s grammar of suffering.

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.

From his southernmost stop in Charleston, Josiah gradually traveled northward. He continued to write in his journals, commenting on the rich exterior displays of the southern men and women he met along the way—“a richness and elegance uncommon with us”—but at the same time questioning their internal strengths: “Nothing that I now saw raised my conceptions of the mental abilities of this people.” And he later noted, “Cards, dice, the bottle and horses engross prodigious portions of time and attention.”32 To Josiah, these Southerners were too absorbed by fun and games. He was scandalized by how their attendance at church on a Sunday was viewed as yet another occasion for socializing, not as the serious commitment to contemplation that churchgoing was in Congregationalist New England: “The Sabbath is a day of visiting and mirth with the Rich, and of license, pastime, and frolic for the negroes.