On Being Negro in America

by J. Saunders Redding

For the coming of the Garveyites shattered the defensive bulwark around the protective community of Negroes. The whites did not understand this at first, nor ever fully. Accustomed as they were to thinking of the Negro as an undifferentiated caste, they could not be expected to. Where there had seemed to be solidarity, there were factions. Where there had been one leadership, now there were more. Where it had been common to associate the force in the local Negro world with individuals, now the mass seemed to rear up faceless; and where no spontaneous drive had seemed to exist, now there was a hum of self-generating energy. The whites did not understand, but some of them found and took an advantage.

In our district which, with only a scattered thirty per cent of the population white, was fast becoming a ghetto, Negroes had enjoyed political control. They had had no trouble electing one of their own to the school board and another to the city council. The same men had been returned to office time and again. What they did there (and they did little) seemed not nearly so important as just being there. They had enormous prestige and influence among Negroes, and they had not had to fight to keep it.

But in the fall elections of that year they did. Directed by agents from New York, the local Garveyites put up their own candidates, chosen on class lines: the encumbents who, in the common phrase, were “dickties,” found their following split. The campaign smelled of pitch and brimstone and led to street brawls between the sadly outnumbered teen-aged children of the encumbent faction and the Garveyites. Still the whites understood only enough of what was happening to give it burlesque treatment in the press. But the agents from New York were professionals, and their professionalism soon showed itself. They made a deal with the white leaders in the ward. Before the Negroes knew anything, the whites had picked their own candidates, and while Negroes fought one another, whites won the offices.

This was a blow—but that is to put it mildly. In our town, as elsewhere in border state and northerly towns, the pattern of a strong, single Negro leadership was fixed (and so, I suspect, was the pattern of a strong, single Polish and Italian and Jewish leadership), and now the white people were in a quandary. The pattern had been broken; they themselves had knocked down the stanchion that gave stability to race relations. A bond issue was coming up, and Negro backing was indispensable to its success. Hitherto the white people had influenced the direction of Negro thought through local Negro leaders. But who were the leaders now? The white people needed them; they felt uncomfortable and even frightened without them; they needed to know and to control, if possible, what the Negroes were thinking. The race riots in Northern cities—Washington, Chester, Chicago—were still green in memory, and Wilmington itself had almost plunged into that civic horror. Congress just then was drumming up a Bolshevist scare, and Congressman James Byrnes, of South Carolina, had called for indictments for sedition against certain national Negro spokesmen.[^[6]]

But the Negroes were equally lost and frightened by the immutable evidence of their own factionalism—and frightened the more that white people knew of it. So long as they could seem to maintain a solid front, no matter what internal tensions actually rived them, they felt reasonably safe. But “Now the white people can cut us up,” my father said. “We are divided.” It never occurred to him that the last thing in the world the white people wanted was a divided Negro population. Enforced segregation and the caste system were proof that they did not. My father, who had spent more than two thirds of his life above the Mason-Dixon line, hated segregation, but he had developed the ghetto-mind which made it bearable and safe.

A war of impulses was (and is, I fear) going on all the time in both whites and Negroes. It is the symptom of an American psychological malady. It is also an indictment of our culture and an offense against democracy. Many understand this now, but most do not. Indeed, most have built sophistic bulwarks against understanding. They do not know this, for the many small, subtle fallacies which they abide through force of habit lessen their sense of moral conflict when they are faced with the great contradiction. My father’s saying, “Don’t ever trust a white man,” is in intent no different from the white man’s saying, “All niggers look alike to me.” The phrases represent the lowest common denominator in the American race-experience. They are the essence of empiricism. They voice experiences so debased and so bereft of humaneness as utterly to discredit our way of life in the eyes of the world. They deny the inspiring first principle of democracy—that the person counts as person, no matter what his color or creed.

“Son,” my father said, the night before I went East to college, “remember you’re a Negro. You’ll have to do twice as much twice better than your classmates. Before you act, think how what you do may reflect on other Negroes. Those white people will be judging the race by you. Don’t let the race down, son.”

I have no memory of protesting this terrible burden laid on my mind and heart. Indeed, I am sure I did not. What my father said checked with what I had been taught to feel. My father went on.

“Out East you may feel it less because there’re fewer Negroes, or for the same reason, you may feel it more. Some say one thing, some the other. But no matter where you go in this country, you’ll never get away from being made to know that you are a Negro.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.