On Being Negro in America

by J. Saunders Redding

I could not believe that what was happening to him could happen. Of course I had heard stories of strict Party discipline, of orders being given to Party members to do what no one in his right mind would do, but I had not believed such stories, though they were common and though they were also congruous with the newspaper accounts of the purges that were then taking place in Russia. I had kept my reservations. But this business with Clark was real. He was someone I knew, and this was happening to him.

“Look,” I said, “why don’t you be sensible? Why don’t you——”

He was shaking his head before I could finish. There seemed to be nothing I could say to arouse him to a true recognition of the fix he was in. Perhaps at bottom he had a martyr complex, but I could not see in him any of the things I associated with martyrdom. There was none of the fire, none of the dignity and nobility I thought of as belonging in the picture. There were not even defiance and rebellion in him—or if they were, Clark kept them hidden beneath layers of stony reserve that could not be penetrated. Besides, it seemed to me that to have to suffer alone for a principle made the principle suspect.

And he suffered alone. I did not go to see him in the Tombs where he was remanded after the preliminary hearing, and on the day of his trial I searched four papers before I found in one of them a short notice: Negro Convicted of Theft.

I saw him again at the trial. It lasted less than twenty minutes. Clark, in the same rumpled brown suit he had worn in jail, was led in. He looked slightly drawn, but I think I was the only one of the twenty or thirty spectators who could have known this. No one seemed to take any interest in this fourth case on the docket. The charge was read. The court-appointed lawyer pleaded guilty. A short, stocky man was sworn in and gave testimony to the effect that so-many and so-many bolts of cloth were missing over a period of months; that company detectives were put on the trail of them, and that finally in March they had found “their man.” Then a private detective testified; then a stock clerk. There were no other witnesses. Clark was ordered to stand. The judge pronounced sentence—five years in prison. Clark looked around at the spectators then, but I could see no change in his expression. He was nudged away. I left the courtroom.

10

Like the capacity for thought and the desire for knowledge, the instincts for personal liberty and, within reason, power over one’s destiny are attributes of the human mind. They are stronger in some than in others. Where they have been weakened by catastrophe—say long-continued planned violence, as in war; or widespread social disorganization, as in times of great economic crises—the instincts can be perverted, or even totally destroyed. There was danger of this perversion (which actually developed in some countries in Europe) during America’s great depression, when the feeling grew that only Franklin D. Roosevelt had answers and that everything depended on him. The American people were all but ripe to surrender their minds and the control of their destiny.

It was the distortion or atrophy of this instinct that the Communists hoped to find in the American Negro. They had good reason for such hopes, and they were not loath to express it: “The especially intense exploitation and heavy oppression to which the millions of Negroes in America are subject make it imperative for the Party to devote its best energies and its maximum resources towards becoming the recognized leader and champion ... of Negroes.”[^[7]] (Italics mine.) The intense exploitation and heavy oppression were true enough. But there was something that the Communists did not take into account; something psychical and perhaps unworldly which even the people whom they hoped to inveigle did not think about. It was not the Negro’s vaunted resiliency, though this was something. Rather it was what I can think of only as the spiritual cohesion of democracy. This cohesion is organic to the delicately balanced ideological structure that democracy is, and it is the attribute which makes it impossible to separate the destiny of America from the destiny of democracy itself.

For democracy is less a form of government than it is a way of life, and the principles—freedom, equality, justice—on which this way of life is founded have an appeal as universal as the idea of God. And what I am saying is that in spite of “heavy oppression” and “intense exploitation,” the American Negro believed in the principles. It was this belief in the principles and the impossibility of ever dissociating them in the Negro’s mind from democracy and America that stymied the Communists, who could not understand why the colored people’s hatred of discrimination, segregation and all the inequities did not lead naturally to a hatred of democracy. But it was like expecting them to hate God because preachers are sometimes rascals.

Nor do I think that this is as abstruse and metaphysical as it sounds. Or if it is, then it is well to remember that American democracy is itself a metaphysic, blending as it does subjective truth (“the inalienable rights of man”) with moral abstractions (“liberty and justice for all”) and mystical concepts (“the will of the people”) which admittedly cannot be achieved by all the institutions ever created by man. It is, this democracy, “impractical.” It was this that the Communists took cognizance of and figured on. They did it three times between 1918 and 1942, and each time in crisis, when they thought the material values which they wished to substitute as the goal of struggle were enhanced by their very absence. The terms they used were purely materialistic too, and they applied them in a context that was unbounded by the American continent—and this was another mistake. “The American Communist Negroes,” the Communists said, “are the historical leaders of their comrades in Africa and to fit them for dealing the most telling blows to world imperialism as allies of the world’s working class is enough to justify all the time and energy that the Workers (Communist) Party must devote to the mobilization for the revolutionary struggle of the Negro workers in American industry.”[^[8]]