On Being Negro in America

by J. Saunders Redding

This was fine and hopeful, and, indeed, the more so that the Declaration was born of the Charter of the United Nations. The Charter is no blueprint for an abstract world. It sets a premium on maturity, of course; but also it sets a premium on respect for reality.

After the General Assembly’s acceptance, to make the Universal Declaration law there remained only the act of ratification by each participating government. It was at this point that a hitch developed. Perhaps the State Department had dismissed, even at its inception, the work of the Commission on Human Rights as unimportant. Perhaps the State Department was so concerned with the “practical and immediate” problems of the cold war that it simply forgot the Declaration for two years, and forgot, too, that the United States had taken the lead in securing the General Assembly’s adoption of a resolution embodying the Declaration. Perhaps there were petty and selfish political considerations. Perhaps there was bald hypocrisy in the whole thing. I cannot give cause. I can only declare that when, in 1950, after what seemed an unnecessarily long delay, the matter of ratification by the United States came up, the State Department demurred.

At first it demurred over the inclusion of Articles 22–27 of the Declaration. But since most of these articles embody principles which are already written into United States law or supported by immemorial custom, the State Department’s objection to them seemed inexplicable. As Rayford Logan, a member of the United States National Commission for UNESCO, pointed out at the time, there is nothing revolutionary to American principles in the statement that “Everyone ... has a right to social security,” or in the statement that “Everyone has a right to education,” or in the statement that “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for health.” No. The objection seemed to be to Article 23:

“(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment. (2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work....” (Italics mine.)

Once the Declaration was ratified, these clauses would have necessitated the establishment of a law no different in intent from the proposed F.E.P.C. But this is not the point that Mr. Edward W. Barrett, of the State Department, made in stating the objection to acceptance of the entire declaration. “Whereas,” he wrote, “a maximum degree of agreement exists (outside the Iron Curtain) on political and civil rights, there is no general agreement on economic and social rights. The laws and practices of the members of the United Nations differ widely on those rights as set forth in the Declaration.”

It does not particularly matter, I suppose, that this amounts to saying that the United Nations had not agreed on what they obviously had agreed on; nor that no clear and sharp distinction (such as Mr. Barrett’s letter implies) can be drawn between political and civil rights on the one hand and economic and social rights on the other.

It does not particularly matter because the State Department gave even grosser expression to the “realistic” point of view that, to paraphrase, democracy is based on compromises in which big ends are surrendered to small goals. Article 16 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says:

“(1) Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family....” (Italics mine.)

Could it be that this provision was in Mr. Barrett’s mind when he wrote: “Neither the Executive Branch nor the Congress would desire that our Government should ratify a convention which contains obligations that our Government and our people are unwilling or unable to honor.”?

There is a deep sickness in the American mind and spirit, and it threatens to infect democracy itself and render it impotent as an ideal. But not only this; the sickness also threatens to make democracy ineffective as an instrument through which the individual can realize his highest self and in co-operation with other selves give zest, richness and meaning to human endeavor. For democracy is two things. It is a political instrument: it is an ideal. As an ideal, the notion of the world as a vast arena, where purposeless and inexplicable forces play, and where inevitable fate renders the mind and the spirit of the individual helpless, dissolves before it. As an ideal, it is in raw conflict with sterile determinism and fatalism. It assumes that the only source of human happiness or misery is human beings themselves, and its very dogma proclaims that co-operative endeavor is the way to human happiness. And this is sensible, for we know—and we know it scientifically—that co-operation is the law of life. When men co-operate, they and their enterprises prosper; peace reigns. This is not humanistic nonsense. Authorized to speak the considered opinion of a group of renowned scientific scholars of the Committee of Experts on Race Problems of UNESCO, Ashley Montagu declared: “Man’s inherent drives toward co-operation need but to be cultivated and intelligently handled for this world to be turned into a Paradise on earth—when all men will, at last, live by the rule it is their nature to live by—the Golden Rule to love your neighbor as yourself.” (Italics mine.)