Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Democrat from New York’s Harlem, who usually voted hand-in-glove with Marcantonio. He is supported in every election by the successors of “Dutch” Schultz, whose policy-slip and murder ring had its headquarters in what is now Powell’s district. He is married to Hazel Scott, Negro pianist, who has been frequently cited by Congressional and Legislative committees as indicating pro-Russian proclivities. She has denied it. He and his wife live in a swank Long Island home, far from his bailiwick, and ride in a chauffeur-driven $6,000 limousine.
William Hastie, former governor of the Virgin Islands, now the first Negro on the exalted bench of the United States Circuit Court of Appeals. In volume 17 of the published records of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities of the House of Representatives, Judge Hastie was cited as belonging to at least five Communist-front organizations. He was, however, subsequently appointed to the Federal bench by President Truman.
Wherever Negroes live, they have their own snobberies, castes and social strata. Rich ones and light ones are contemptuous of the poor and the black, and toward them they more often use the tabooed word “nigger” than do most whites. And they add one extra prejudice, not found among whites—resentment of the native-born Negro for the recent comer from the Southern plantations.
7. MIGHTY LIKE A ROSE
There is a daily in Washington (as there are others in principal cities) which never identifies a Negro as such unless he wins a Nobel prize or is selected the rookie of the year.
We protest. News cannot be honestly reported by arbitrarily slurring facts. Of almost all other non-whites, many are marked by recognizable names. Most Negroes have Anglo-Saxon names, many of them adopted centuries ago from their slave-owners. For instance, Thompson’s Ebenezer evolved into Ebenezer Thompson.
That same newspaper does not bar true and fair reports of misdeeds by people named O’Rourke or Ginsberg or Dinkelspiel or Stanislawsky or Protopulus or Garcia or Potapinsky or Napolitano. Concealment of the identity as Negro distorts the truth, for the natural assumption then is that the miscreants are white and we have an unjustified libel on the Caucasian population.
The most rabid Negro papers publish the crimes of their own people and then editorialize on the cruel inequalities which help to cause them. That is the proper use of freedom of the press. Arbitrary withholding of vital facts is an impertinence and a misuse of the common franchise.