On Being Negro in America

by J. Saunders Redding

Exaggerated? But toward truth, not away from it. That competition, which was once confined to the lowest economic levels and which resulted in the legendary hatred of the poor-white masses for the Negro and vice versa, operates on higher levels now. It is on the level of skilled labor, as the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen knew when they brought suit to enjoin railroads from promoting Negro firemen (also members of the Brotherhood) to engineers. It is on the level of education, and persons reported to be students of the medical college of the University of South Carolina admitted sending threatening letters to a Negro applicant and burning a cross on his front lawn. It is on the level of the professions, so that a committee of the National Bar Association, a Negro group, felt constrained to report that “as the quality of training rises, Negro lawyers find it harder to win admission to the bar in some Southern states.”

Actually, of course, it is no longer possible to predicate discrimination and segregation on Negro inferiority. So long as it was possible and seemed forever possible, the “practical-minded” found a kind of social justification in disfranchisement, in raising economic and cultural barriers, in the despotic paternalism which said, “Thou shalt not.” Even the Negro leader, Booker Washington, found it blameless and, indeed, good, without ever suspecting that the tradition of noblesse oblige, on which all this was claimed to be founded, might someday be as ineffective as necromancy. Segregation was order; it was control; it was the steel and concrete casing sealing up a devastating social explosion. It still seems so to the vast majority and their leaders.

The strongest voices in the South today say that segregation must be kept: Governor James Byrnes in his inaugural was not so intent on expressing his views on foreign policy that he did not assure his listeners of his unaltered opposition to the Fair Deal. Hodding Carter, the liberal mentioned above, is not so liberal that he does not see it as “tragic for the South, the Negro, and the nation itself” if segregation is done away with. And “only a fool,” Lillian Smith quotes from the Atlanta Constitution, “would say the Southern pattern of separation of the races can, or should be overthrown.” But if segregation must be kept, it must now be predicated on something else than Negro inferiority.

And what else is there? The cynical ideology of power-worship, what H. A. Overstreet calls “the fight-and-grab image,” the philosophy of hate. It is what Hitler came to. It is the result of a pattern of thinking desperately threatened by science and social change.

8

I am an integrationist. I have been for a long time. It is not a principle that I arrived at through intellection. Until the past few years, I did not bring to bear on it whatever intelligence I have. I felt my way to it, just as some men, in spite of obstructing experience, feel their way to ideals of honesty, sobriety and continence. Nor was the feeling of my way wholly conscious. It was rather like the action of one who kicks and splashes frantically to save himself from drowning and suddenly finds that he has reached a shelf on which he can stand in the river bed. His objective was not the shelf, but just to be saved. I kicked and splashed in all directions, and suddenly there I was.

I was an integrationist when the Communists camped almost nightly on my trail in the early 1930’s and lighted beckoning bright fires in the frightening dark of that time. I did not believe then (any more than now) that the moment the bars of segregation are lifted all the white women of the South will fall into the arms of Negro mates. Many of my acquaintances gleefully professed to believe this and would just as gleefully declare that Negroes lynched for rape had been only unlucky in being caught with their always-willing white paramours. They found substance for this opinion in both fact and fiction, which too loudly proclaimed the revulsive feeling of the white female for the Negro and the inviolable purity of white womanhood. My acquaintances believed that Southern whites protested too much.

And so, it seems, did the Communists. Or perhaps they did not. It could have been just a line and the carrying out of explicit directives on “How to Recruit Negroes in the Eastern States.” It could have been that they played expertly on what they thought were the secret dreams of a young, green, mixed-up and lonely man.

I suppose all people suffer from these maladies, and especially from youth, in early adulthood; but I had more besides. I had a severe case of “Negrophophilia” which alternately wrenched my heart with hate and love. I was confused about the direction of my life and extremely doubtful (as I sometimes am today) of life’s purpose. Whether naturally or through learning, I shrank from all but a handful of people, and some of these were a disappointment to me, and I have no doubt that I was a sore trial to them. I lacked social accommodation. I have never thought tolerance admirable as a principle either of adjustment or feeling, and I rejected it entirely for my friends. Dogs were to be tolerated, and crying babies, and strangers with whom one did not have to become acquainted. My friends were constantly not living up to my foolish expectations; my judgments were severe. I was continually breaking with and rejoining them, but with no increase in understanding.

I do not think I would have become a Communist even had these deficiencies not been in me. But, certainly, except for them, the Communists would have had an easier time assailing my weak position on the extreme left flank of democracy. The wrong scouts came to reconnoiter, and they took the wrong approach.