Books: Second-Class Citizens

WHAT THE NEGRO WANTS—Edited by Rayford W. Logan—Chapel Hill ($3.50).

Negro soldiers, entraining for overseas duty, paused to look at the patriotic poster spread across the wall of a railroad terminus. “What You Are Fighting For!” boomed the slogan under a sea of proud, anxious American faces. The Negroes “gave the eye-catching picture a swift glance and then snapped their heads away, almost as if by command.” Every face on the poster was white.

Rayford W. Logan, professor of history at Howard University and editor of What the Negro Wants, believes that in the midst of World War II “race relations are more strained than they have been in . . . years.” He has chosen 14 leading Negroes—ranging from poet to trade-unionist, conservative to Communist—to state the Negro case. The result is a series of balanced, thoughtful articles on one of the most serious postwar U.S. problems, mostly well-written, mainly free from political rhetoric.

“Pontius Pilatism.” Negroes, says A. Philip Randolph, President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, are learning that neither Democrats nor Republicans can safely be relied on for help. So far as the Negro is concerned, they are simply “two peas in a pod . . . tweedledee and tweedledum.” Negroes are also losing their fear of being terrorized and beaten in retaliation for becoming politically active. “Time and again,” says Professor Sterling A. Brown, “I heard the anecdote … of the new sort of hero—the Negro soldier who, having taken all he could stand, shed his coat, faced his persecutors and said: ‘If I’ve got to die for democracy, I might as well die for some of it right here and now.’ “

To whites who have bravely taken the Negro’s part (sheriffs who have braved mobs to protect Negro prisoners, women who have leagued against lynching, trade-union organizers who have risked life & limb), the authors pay tribute. But Negroes, says Dr. Gordon B. Hancock, are bewildered by the number of sympathetic whites whose “finer feelings are obscured beneath a lack of moral courage … a kind of ‘Pontius Pilatism.'” The more cynical Negroes merely conclude that the saving grace of the white man is “his lack of unanimity in any program … of oppression.”

“Be Patriotic, Avoid Friction.” To some, the final insult to Negro pride is the appearance of the European refugee, who is free to vote, eat where he wishes, and attain full citizenship, while the native-born Negro, often of old U.S. stock, must remain a semi outcast.

Negroes are coming to realize that the Negro dilemma is not confined to the South, that the old Negro idea of Northern freedom is a “myth.” Since Pearl Harbor they have watched Army and Navy segregation policies carry Jim Crowism into towns and villages in which it had never existed before. “Democracy to many,” concludes Sterling A. Brown, “seems to be symbolized by this message … on a bus in South Carolina: ‘If the peoples of this country’s races do not pull together, Victory is lost. … Be patriotic. Avoid friction. White passengers will be seated from front to rear; colored passengers from rear to front.’ “

Not What, But How. The only misleading aspect of What the Negro Wants is its title. Each of Editor Logan’s contributors answers the title-question promptly, briefly, and in the same way, then passes on to what really interests him: how the Negro is to get what he wants. All 14 want “complete equality in the body politic,” “full social equality,” “first-class citizenship,” “the same racial equality at the ballot box that we have at the income-tax window.” But on the “how” of getting these things, Editor Logan’s 14 writers split basically into two camps, choosing roughly between the methods of two famous Negro leaders: conservative, cautious, compromising Booker T. Washington and politically aggressive Frederick Douglass. To followers of the former, “changing public opinion is the mightiest weapon for the Negro’s deliverance.” To the latter’s disciples, the Negro’s future task is to give “life, reality and force to [the] social and political principles of freedom … set forth in the Declaration of Independence.”

Prime proposals:

¶ “A revolutionary program of re-education,” aimed to present the Negro (in books, newspapers, movies, texts) to the public in a fair, sober light. “The university of the arts has permitted Paul Robeson, Marian Anderson, and Roland Hayes to ‘convert’ many hostile persons. Jesse Owens . . . Joe Louis . . . George Washington Carver . . . have provided the first jolt to many minds steeped in stereotyped ideas.”

¶ Because soldiers “should be prepared for friendships as well as killing, classes in democracy” should be set up in every U.S. training camp and among units overseas. “Just as a set of Government suggestions has been issued to our soldiers on how to act in England, so a similar set should be given them on how to act in Alabama.”

¶ “The March-on-Washington Movement.” Also nonviolent mass marches around plants and offices whose owners discriminate against Negroes, followed by picketing, boycotting. Southern Negroes should set aside a day when they refuse to send their children to Jim Crow schools, boycott streetcars, busses, trains.

¶ Nonviolent Good Will Direct Action.” Example: “White friends precede. ” Negro patrons to a table in a . . . restaurant or hotel. Upon seeing the Negro citizens denied service, [they] join the Negroes in requesting a conference with the management. … If a conference is denied, civil-rights action . . . may be filed. … If … the Negro and white friends are violently ejected . . the policy . . . is not to fight back.”