On Being Negro in America

by J. Saunders Redding

Fortunately integration is not a political concept (though it has been made a political issue) and is therefore not identified with the name of a leader. This has the advantage of depriving the opposition of that damaging leverage of vulnerable personality which leadership identification always provides and which can destroy or throw into long-lasting paralysis even the most salutary and easily defended social concepts. If you cannot overthrow the ideas which you fear or hate, then attack the man behind the ideas and thus debase what he stands for. That is the history of the struggle against ideas.

But if the concept of integration has this advantage, it has also the disadvantage of being indivisible. There is no decalogue of integration, each item of which can be separately assimilated and practiced. It is not a “one thing at a time” thing, nor a “first things first” thing. It must be assimilated all at once or killed all at once.

And it is this fact, I think, that frightens Negroes of the more stable classes. They see in integration a breakdown of certain monopolies in education and the professions and some business enterprises. In my own home town, for instance, where segregation could have been abolished twenty years ago, the Negro owner of the only Negro theater, who was at the same time on the city council, fought every attempt to wipe out the practice of excluding Negroes from white theaters, indoor sporting events, and other places of entertainment. He could get aid and comfort from a Negro school principal and certain Negro teachers who were afraid that the ell would lead to the mile and that their jobs would be thrown into an open nonracial competition which they were not prepared, they felt, to meet.

But also integration is in conflict with all that whites as well as Negroes have been taught to believe. It is in conflict with all that they think of as making for harmonious social development. Most whites are convinced that integration is the way to social and even biological disaster. Conviction is emotional and generally not to be argued with. If segregationalists could be argued with, they would not be segregationalists in the first place. They have taken their position on nonarguable grounds, and I think they have taken it quite contrary to their intellectual understanding of the problem central to our age. The Georgia Legislature, in this year 1951, was very sincere when it saw fit to pass a bill providing that no funds appropriated for education could go to institutions that did not enforce segregation. Only weeks later, Governor Byrnes of South Carolina, who has been a Senator, a Supreme Court Justice and Secretary of State, declared that “The politicians in Washington and the Negro agitators in North Carolina who today seek to abolish segregation in all schools will learn that what a carpetbag government could not do in the Reconstruction Period cannot be done in this period.” He then proceeded to express the view that before what “could not be done” would be done, the public-school system in South Carolina would be abolished.[^[10]]

This is paradox and irony. There is the obvious irony of advocating the abolishment of the very thing on which democracy must rest—a publicly schooled citizenry—in order to ensure, as Byrnes implied, the perpetuation of democracy. But the paradox goes deeper, for if there is emotionalism in Byrnes’s words, there is also the opposite of emotionalism. For his words represent a deliberate and a socially dominant response based on static concepts and ideals—the concept of the Negro’s inherent inferiority, and the ideal of the white “Anglo-Saxon,” predominantly Protestant community which earns its right to Divine favor because it contributes to Negro causes, does not deliberately encourage the persecution of either Jews or Catholics, and even occasionally permits itself the hazard of proclaiming the world one.

That the concept of complete integration, which seems to me to represent the logical evolution of democratic thinking, should be in deep conflict with the actualities of American learning (I will not say “teaching”) is the supreme paradox of our democracy. The central problem of our age is that of expressing the oneness of man. The UNESCO “Statement on Race” makes this abundantly clear: “The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoints is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man.” Admittedly Americans and a goodly portion of the peoples of the Western world believe that democracy is the frame—and perhaps the only frame—within which unity can be achieved and maintained. They must believe this, else their propagandic and materialistic promotion of it, their assiduous and even frantic efforts to “sell” it to the rest of the world is basically an immoral and selfish offering of the democratic experience to mankind at the price of man’s soul. In so far as the American people, who lead the Western world, believe that democracy is the enduring frame of unity, then they must flatter themselves with a belief in a great destiny. And this is all very well, but they must also realize that Western democratic civilization has arrived at the point at which the path of development proper to man and necessary to democracy is marked “Integration.” If it is not chosen now, then the American people must reform their wants, modify detrusively their ideals, and deliberately dissolve those organic bonds of principle which give the ultimate meaning to democracy. They must stop being moved by the symbols “the inalienable rights of man,” “the pursuit of happiness,” “liberty” and “equality,” and enshrine, instead of these symbols of man’s hope, those of fear—survival, collective security. The journey down the path of integration is not one to be put off until tomorrow. Tomorrow is now.

I do not wish to push this too far, but there can be little doubt that integration is a practical concern latent in our modern world. It is no preposterous idealism offered merely in contravention of a prevailing view and practices that are working for most men. The simple truth is that the prevailing practices are not working for most men. While at the same time his conscience is disturbed by this fact, Western man is so fixed in the once-comfortable conviction of his own superiority that he seems powerless to change the practices that support his conviction. This is a fault of his adolescence. It is a cavalier unconcern for his lack of knowledge of others. It is an inability to understand the world society of which he is a part. “World society” is no longer a metaphysical abstraction. It is very real, very concrete. It is real enough to have reduced the margin for national initiative in the conduct of internal affairs. It is no longer possible for the United States to keep the differences she has made between the races—and embedded in law and custom—without making a fundamental denial of what she professes before the world to stand for and to fight for, the entity of mankind.

12

Perhaps I make too much of this, and perhaps I am overwrought and unreasonable about it. I must confess that there flit across my mind, like stones skipped on the surface of water (only to sink into it), thoughts of my sons. There are moments when I am sentimental enough to hope that history is a necessary progress toward better things and that frustrations of the human spirit grow less and less. I know better. But I have such hopes when my sons are involved, and I am inclined to support them intemperately.

It does not serve merely to shrug one’s shoulders and carp about the psychic traumas that bedevil American man. At least it did not do seven years ago, when my older son was eight and my younger not yet born. And now that my younger is himself almost seven, it still will not do. Argument does not exactly serve either, although I think I argue for something eminently sane. It is simplicity. I argue the substitution of spontaneous, instinctive responses for the deliberate responses based, as I have said above, on unchanging ideas and ideals. It seems to me that the old rules—evoked as they were out of the utmost confusion of morality and social expedience, and deliberate ignorance—are not only unnecessarily complicated for modern times and people, but that they are progressively unsuitable to modern ways of living, to the advance of knowledge, to technology, and (surely everyone will allow this) to one-worldness. Make the rules simple enough and we can play the hardest game.