The iron will, the open heart and mind,
The hope, the wish, the thought refined—
These compass points for a true reckoning.
These are not a full expression of her thought, for there was enough of the chauvinist and enough of the sense of reality in her to make it clear that in her time, except in the most unusual circumstances, the limits of progress for the Negro were within the Negro world. Yet she spoke with pensive pride of Howard Drew, who had been a great college athlete and who was then a Hartford lawyer with an entirely white clientele; and of Maria Baldwin, the Negro principal of the very estimable Agassiz School in Cambridge, where many Harvard professors sent their children; and of Lillian Evans (Madame Evanti), who sang opera for a season at La Scala; and even (though with less pride, for the theater was still suspect in her mind) of Bert Williams.
But my father was different. He took pride in such successes too, but it irritated him that the knowledge of them was not more widespread. He would have used them on the one hand as arguments against the white-superiority theories of Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant and Jerome Dowd, and on the other, as arguments for his own theory that the Negro could and should develop his own American culture. I saw him brought to the verge of tears when the Brown and Stevens Bank—“the richest and safest Negro bank in the world”—failed back in the early 1920’s. And this was not because he lost money in that disastrous collapse—he didn’t—but because that failure cast dark shadows over the prospects of a self-sustaining Negro culture. He saw other shadows many times, but he remained (and now in his eighty-second year remains still in his heart, I think) a race chauvinist. For him there was no incongruity between this and his insistence that his sons go East to a New England college.
Through all the years of my boyhood, my father was secretary of the Wilmington, Delaware, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; secretary-treasurer of the Sara Ann White Home (now the Layton Home) for Aged Colored People; and a member of the board of the local Negro Y.M.C.A., which he helped found. Besides, he had certain pet, private projects, like needling the truant officer for not making colored children go to school, and upbraiding the police for permitting (interracial) vice to flourish in some Negro neighborhoods, and scolding fallen Negro women and derelict Negro men wherever he found them. He was buoyant and earnest and uplifted in the prosecution of these activities. What characters were drawn to our house! How desperate they were (I know now) in their search for simplification and for that dignity of being that derives only from a sense of belonging!
For these—simplicity and dignity—after all are the true things for which men strive. Unable to attain them in the large sense, men slice life up into manipulatable segments, institute policies of control, reduce to some petty enslaving program and to slogans the great purposes of life—“America for Americans,” “For the Advancement of Colored People,” “The True Church”—and march uneasily toward their graves under the illusion that the particular distortion into which they have been drawn is the straight and narrow path to salvation.
My father was like that. I think that all the Negroes I knew in my childhood were like that. It was not altogether their fault. It need not be pointed out that they had almost no say in determining the basic conditions under which they lived, and that it was this common suffering that drew them together in the first place. But subject to the common suffering was no mass man, but classes and individuals, and what they endured together they examined separately in the powerful lights of personal and class interests and ambitions. And under these lights the caste principle, which white society insisted on and to which the Negroes were responding in the first place—under these lights, the caste principle broke down. Negroness was not itself enough. The phrase, “We’re all Negroes together,” so often heard as a battle cry, had only a sporadic potency. Within the Negro group there were bitter conflicts and grave contradictions.
I remember when the tidal wave of Garveyism[[5]] swept over the walls my father had been hastily building against it. He had not had much warning. As secretary of the Wilmington, Delaware, N.A.A.C.P., he read—nay, studied—the Crisis, the Association’s national organ. He knew the official line was that Marcus Garvey was a mountebank and his outfit swindlers preying on the poverty and ignorance of the lower classes. “Do not,” the Crisis said, “invest in the conquest of Africa. Do not take desperate chances in flighty dreams.” My father knew also, with increasing disquiet, how fast the Garvey following was growing. But somehow he felt that only people of the slums could be attracted to it, and he did not think of Wilmington as having a real slum. Of course he was naïf in this, for a stone’s throw east of our house began a noisome squalor of existence that spread like thick slime to the river. When a sturdy, hard-working citizen (respected because he was hard-working and kept his children in school and did not let his insurance lapse) came bringing my father an official invitation to join the Garveyite “line of march,” my father issued an urgent call to the members of the N.A.A.C.P. for a meeting.
But it was too late, for suddenly the Garveyites were upon us. They came with much shouting and blare of bugles and a forest of flags—a black star centered in a red field. They made speeches in the vacant lot where carnivals used to spread their tents. They had a huge, colorful parade, and young women, tensely sober of mien and plain even in their uniforms, distributed millions of streamers bearing the slogan “Back to Africa.” My father and I stood on the cross street below our house and watched the parade swagger by. Among the marchers my father spotted more than one “Advancer” (his term), even their wives and children. They were not people of the slums. They were men with small struggling clothes-pressing shops and restaurants, personal servants, and what Thomas J. Woofter, Jr., calls “black yeomen,” unlearned but percipient. They had been dependable attendants at meetings promising Negro uplift, and loyal though perhaps somewhat awed members of the N.A.A.C.P. Some of them my father had personally recruited, and low groans of dismay escaped him when he saw them in the line of march. I was a boy, but I remember. And not so much because of the parade as for what happened after.