The Press: The U. S. Negro, 1953

“TELL me,” asked the British visitor, “do your Negroes play golf?”

The question, put to a U.S. businessman, brought a stammering answer.

Yes, said the businessman, he supposed that U.S. Negroes played golf, but he had never seen one with a club in his hand. Come to think of it, he’d seen a picture of Joe Louis on a golf course, but he had no idea at what club Joe could play.

The incident illustrates how little white Americans generally know about their colored fellow citizens. Negroes, in the phrase of the sociologists, have “high social visibility.” But their lives are in effect invisible to most Americans, who rarely bother to look behind the Color Curtain at the Negroes’ homes, their places of work or worship, or their spirit. There is, as a matter of fact, some news about Negro golfing.

¶Atlanta and New Orleans recently opened golf courses for Negroes.

¶In Seattle, Negroes are now free to play on all public golf courses (but they still may not take part in tournaments played on the same courses).

¶In Chicago, where they play on public courses without restriction, the number of Negro golfers has gone up from 25, a few years ago, to more than 2,000.

¶In New York there are no restrictions on public courses, and Negroes do play in tournaments.

These facts & figures, modest in themselves, are symptoms of a major revolution in the life of the U.S. Negro—only half-noticed by the rest of the nation. It is a revolution which, although still far from overthrowing segregation, amounts to the biggest, most hopeful change in Negro history since Abraham Lincoln, just 90 years ago, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Says Negro Publisher (Ebony, Jet) John H. Johnson: “Every Negro is a Horatio Alger . . . His trek up from slavery is the greatest success story the world has ever known.”

Markers or Progress

One of the great facts of U.S. history is that the Negro, no matter how ill used, has remained deeply loyal to the U.S., always hoping for the “Year of Jubilo,” stubbornly telling himself

The very time I thought I was lost

The dungeon shook and the chain jell off . . .

You got a right, I got a right,

We all got a right to the tree of life . . .

The fruit from the tree of life is still rationed, and often bitter. The U.S.’s 15 million Negroes are still denied the right to the pursuit of happiness on equal terms with whites. Negroes still do the meanest jobs and get the lowest pay; they must slowly wrest from their white fellows a table in a restaurant, a desk in a school, a smile, the privilege of praying in a white church or using a white swimming pool. This is true on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. While the Negro is generally better off, economically and socially, in the North (as is shown by the fact that thousands of Southern Negroes still move north every year), the North has no cause to feel superior. The chains of prejudice can be as heavy in New York’s Harlem or on Chicago’s South Side as anywhere in the South. Yet North & South, the Year of Jubilo seems a little closer.

In 1942, in a brilliant study of the American Negro, Swedish Economist Gunnar Myrdal reported: “Negroes are in desperate need of jobs and bread, even more so than of justice in the courts and of the vote.” This definition of the Negro’s needs is today strikingly out of date. ^ For most Negroes, the problem is no longer jobs, but better jobs; for many, it is no longer bread, but cake. The Negro wage earner today makes four times as much as in 1940 (compared to the white wage earner’s 2½ times as much). The Negro’s average yearly income is still only a little more than half of the white average, but ten years ago it was about 35%.

¶ The forces that kept the Southern Negro from voting—intimidation and the poll tax—are largely beaten. The South has more than 1,000,000 registered Negro voters (compared to 300,000 in 1938), and there could be half a million more if Southern Negroes were politically less apathetic.

¶ The Negro gets justice in the courts, although in some Southern courts he still has to fight for his right (affirmed by the Supreme Court) to be heard by mixed juries. The big issue today is no longer justice in the courts, but justice in daily life, i.e., the fight against segregation.

¶Negro college enrollment is up 2,500% over 1930.

¶The life expectancy of the male Negro has gone up from 47 years in 1920 to 59 years. In the same period, the white’s life expectancy has risen more slowly, from 56 to 66 years. With improving living standards, the gap between the white man’s and the Negro’s life span is closing.

Prosperity: Cadillacs & Babbitts

The signs of Negro prosperity are everywhere. On the rooftops of Manhattan’s Harlem grows that bare, ugly forest of TV antennae which has become a new symbol of middle-class achievement. On the outskirts of Atlanta are shiny new Negro housing developments (financed by Southern whites), with built-in washing machines. Yet the streets of Harlem are still largely slum streets, and a few blocks from the Atlanta apartments stand the old clapboard huts with outdoor privies. Where should one look for the real direction of the Negro economy?

U.S. business, for one, has its eyes fixed eagerly on the TV antennae and the washing machines. U.S. Negroes today have an annual income of $15 billion a year—almost as much as the national income of Canada, or more than the value of all U.S. export trade. Negro publications, whose advertising columns were until recently dominated by hair-straighteners and skin-bleachers, are now agleam with four-color ads of all the national brands—a dusky glamour girl smiling above a pack of Luckies, Negro men of distinction sipping Calvert, a Negro executive praising Remington typewriters. (Most advertising agencies now have special Negro market consultants who see to it that ads will sell and not offend Negroes.)

The Negro is a good customer. He wants to feel that he can buy the best. Swift & Co. does not advertise its ordinary fowl in Negro publications, but the more expensive Swift’s Premium (“The dream chicken that came true”). Several Negro families often pool their savings to buy an expensive car and drive it on alternate days. On Harlem’s Lenox Avenue, Cadillacs are so commonplace that nobody turns to look at them any more (a situation which one resourceful driver met by having his Cadillac’s top painted a gay plaid).

Some of the Cadillac prosperity is obviously false or forced; many Negroes are driven to spend their earnings in showy ways because they still cannot get the more ordinary things a white man with a similar income would buy, e.g., a decent home or a vacation trip to a good resort. Says a Negro leader in St. Louis (where Negro housing is particularly bad): “A flashy car becomes their living room, the only one they’ve got.” Says a San Francisco Negro: “It is a sort of mobile aspirin tablet.”

Despite the flashy cars, the Negro’s spending habits have changed radically. He saves much more than he used to. Big insurance companies, which once considered Negro business more trouble than it was worth, now go after it. Loan companies, car dealers, etc. find Negroes excellent credit risks. There are signs that the Negro has begun to develop a large, strong middle class. Some Negro leaders, in fact, believe—and they do not consider it a bad thing—that the Negro is turning into the nation’s new Babbitt.

Though Negro home ownership has gone up dramatically, the most depressing feature of the Negro’s existence is still his home. Negroes now own nearly a third of the places they live in, a two-thirds rise over 1940. (White home ownership has risen more slowly in the same period, is now 57%.) But nearly a third of all Negro homes are dilapidated, compared with less than 10% in the nation as a whole. More than 20% of all Negro homes are overcrowded, compared with 5^% in the nation as a whole.

The Great Emancipators

The foundation of the Negro’s economic progress is the fact that he has broken in large numbers out of farm and domestic work into industry. During World War II, a million Negroes went into defense industries. By & large, they have stayed in industry ever since. Today, nearly 11% of all U.S. industrial workers are Negroes—twice as many as in 1940. Most Negroes are still held to unskilled jobs. But there has been progress:

¶ Among U.S. skilled workers and foremen, 4% are now Negroes, up from 2½% in 1940.

¶Among clerical and sales personnel, 3½% are now Negroes, up from 1% in 1940.

¶Among women professional and technical workers, 7% are Negroes, up from 4½% in 1940.

One big trouble: there simply are not enough qualified Negroes. Example: U.S. industry will hire all the Negro engineers it can get, but few Negro college students go in for science or engineering. They still favor the respectable, relatively secure professions, such as teaching, medicine, the ministry and the law. In business, Negroes are generally in service lines, e.g., undertakers, barbers, cleaners, etc. This is not entirely the result of discrimination. Also to blame: the Negro’s lack of confidence, which makes him underestimate his very real opportunities.

Negroes know that they have advanced because these are good times for the country as a whole, and some fear that their gains might melt away in a depression. But most Negro leaders agree that the Negro’s progress in the past decade has been too solid ever to be rolled back easily. One measure of that progress is the fact that the Negro’s biggest preoccupation is not economics, but social equality.

The biggest single blow against segregation in the U.S. has been struck by the armed forces. The great experiment of “integration” proved once & for all that 1) if decently treated and trained, Negroes can fight as well as any man; 2) if properly led, white Americans from any part of the country will live, work, fight and die side by side with Negroes.

From the Civil War through World War II, Negro soldiers were kept in segregated units. Despite individual bravery, their morale and performance were generally low. In World War II there were some outstanding Negro units, but of all the Negroes in uniform (about 1,000.000), 90% were kept in rear-area service outfits. During the Battle of the Bulge, when he urgently needed reinforcements, General Eisenhower put Negro service troops through a quick combat training course, attached them in platoon strength to line companies. The experiment worked: the Negro troops, more or less unsegregated for the first time, made a good combat showing. This experience became an argument for postwar integration policy.

The Air Force was the first to abolish separate units for Negroes. The Army followed. By 1951, in the U.S., Europe and the Far East, Negro soldiers were scattered through the regular units. Today the Army has 200,000 Negro enlisted men (n% of total strength) and nearly 4,000 officers. The Air Force has 70,000 enlisted men (7%) and nearly 1,000 officers. The Navy, lagging behind the others in giving equality to the Negro, has 34,000 enlisted men (a little less than 3%, half of them still in the mess steward’s branch) and 65 officers.

In Army camps and Air Force bases across the nation, there have been virtually no “incidents” between white and colored soldiers. The only difficulty has occurred at Southern Army camps, where children of colored officers and enlisted men are still sent to segregated colored schools off the post (the President has recently promised to remedy that situation). In Korea the integration policy has worked wonders with the morale of white as well as Negro troops. Negro officers command white troops without any friction. The matter is no longer even discussed. Says Lieut. Colonel Robert W. Wilson of Washington, D.C., a G-1 officer, and a Negro: “I think about the color problem about once a day: when I shave in the morning.”

There are other emancipators at work. Among them:

THE MACHINE. It was fashionable, in the ’20s and ’30s, particularly among pink-eyed young economists, to say that the machine degraded man. Actually, it has proved a great equalizer. It tests a man coldly and without prejudice: he can either run it or he cannot. North & South, thousands of Negroes are experiencing equality for the first time in their lives—the equality of doing exactly the same work as whites on the assembly line.

THE COURTS. For years, liberals have argued that only new, drastic and specific legislation, i.e., FEPC, would do the Negroes any good. Yet in the past decade, the Negro has made tremendous progress not, in the main, through new legislation, but through a long series of court decisions interpreting the basic law of the land, the Constitution. These rulings, it was usually warned, were “out of step” with popular sentiment and would provoke trouble; yet, accepted virtually without protest, they have quietly accomplished a variety of things, from forcing Southern state universities to accept Negro graduate students to opening up Chicago bowling alleys to interracial teams.

SPORTS & TV. The sight of Negroes playing major-league baseball, carried all over the nation by TV, has probably done as much for equality as most legal victories. Southern minor-league clubs have begun to hire Negro players. TV has had another effect on the South: it has carried to thousands of people their first sight of colored and white entertainers appearing together. Says one Negro teacher: “Why, stuff like that, coming into white homes, it’s going to make the white man think, whether he realizes it or not.”

These very American forces, constantly working on North & South alike, have driven racial discrimination and prejudice sharply on the defensive.

The North: Guerrillas on Main Street

What is it like to be a Negro and actively fight segregation in the North? Hascal Othello Humes, 30, is an A.B. from Columbia University, a former infantry lieutenant who saw combat in Italy. With his wife, he lives in a white neighborhood in Seattle. When they first moved in, the Humeses got threatening letters and obscene telephone calls, but they stuck it out. Humes has three jobs: he is studying for an M.A. in psychology at the University of Washington, he is a city policeman in the afternoon, and at night he is a bouncer in a mixed nightclub. His police beat is in a white section, and when some white people objected, his superior suggested that he ask for a transfer, but he quietly replied that he would rather resign from the force. After he goes off duty each evening, he reports for work at the China Pheasant. By closing time (5 a.m.), Humes has usually lifted at least one drunk (white or colored) well above the floor and carried him into the street. Humes says he does not often wonder whether it’s all worth it. But when he does, he thinks of his wife and of the new baby she is expecting. If that doesn’t help, he prays.

Humes’s life illustrates the price the Northern Negro often pays for his state of semi-equality. As a citizen, the Negro in the North, by & large, enjoys full rights: everywhere except in the border states, he is equal in the schools and in most public services. His great fight in the last decade has been for simple, decent treatment in everyday life. In this fight, he has made marked but uneven progress.

Ten years ago, for example. Northern hotels and restaurants that would openly turn away Negro patrons were in the majority; now they are definitely in the minority. The facile old excuse—”Personally, I don’t care, but the customers just wouldn’t stand for Negroes to come in here”—has been proved empty again & again. The chief trouble is that the Negro can never be sure: he is in a constant guerrilla war, always half-expecting to be snubbed by this desk clerk or that headwaiter, or fobbed off with a gentlemen’s-agreement type of spiel that all the tables have been reserved, all the rooms taken. Many Negroes prefer not to risk being embarrassed, stay away from predominantly white places. On trips, many prefer to drive all night, rather than take the chance of being turned down by a hotel.

But there are many wedges in the walls of prejudice: ¶ Telephone companies in the North, all white until a few years ago, now employ 5,000 Negroes.

¶ Denver now employs Negro bus drivers (long since a fixture in New York and Chicago).

¶Detroit banks, in white neighborhoods, employ Negro tellers.

¶ Many Northern department stores hire Negro sales help.

¶ New York breweries now hire Negro production workers.

The Negro’s biggest trouble comes when he tries to live in a white neighborhood. The worst race riots in recent U.S. history took place in Detroit (1943) and Chicago (1951), where there had been a huge, wartime influx of Negro workers. Today, both cities live in somewhat uneasy peace. The case of Chicago is fairly typical. “Property owners’ leagues,” openly dedicated to keeping Negroes out of white neighborhoods, have disappeared or gone underground. Nevertheless, Negroes rarely escape their ghetto—they simply stretch its boundaries. White people retreat before the Negro advance—generally to the suburbs, where Negroes are usually strictly barred. In many Chicago neighborhoods, Negroes and whites live side by side. A mayor’s commission has organized the “lighthouse system,” under which citizens alert police as soon as trouble signs appear in a neighborhood. Police themselves have been put through a special “human relations” training program.

The South: Minefield among Magnolias

Even if he does not meet outright hostility in the North, the Negro is apt to meet indifference, which can hurt worse. Not many Northerners are interested enough in Negroes to worry about where they ride on a streetcar; but few are interested enough to be really kind to them, either. The South—still the home of two-thirds of the U.S.’s Negroes—cares far more deeply about its Negro problem.

A South African visitor reports: “I went down there to find the Deep South. But everywhere I went, they said: ‘Oh, this isn’t the Deep South. You’ve got to go farther on to find what you’re looking for, Mister.’ I never did find the Deep South, where they lynch Negroes and provide source material for William Faulkner and Lillian Smith. It wasn’t in Tennessee, it wasn’t in Georgia, it wasn’t in Mississippi. Now I’m beginning to wonder whether the Deep South really exists any more.”

There is a lot of evidence that it does not. The color line is no longer a barbed-wire fence strung between the magnolia trees. It is more like a minefield through which whites and Negroes must carefully pick their way—and the map is obviously out of date. Segregation now seems like something out of Alice in Wonderland as rewritten by Herman Talmadge.

In the South, a Negro may ride a Pullman car and eat anywhere in a diner (until a few years ago, he had to eat behind a curtain). But he must buy his tickets at a segregated ticket window. He may sit anywhere in an airplane, but his waiting room at the airport is likely to be Jim Crow. He may ride in elevators, body-to-body with whites, but in buses and streetcars he must still jostle past standing white passengers to the Jim Crow rear. (In some cities, he may sit down in the white area if there are empty seats, and white people will often sit down in the colored area if the white area is crowded.)

Several states give Negro doctors full membership in their medical societies, but Negro doctors are not allowed to practice in most Southern hospitals. (White private ambulances often refuse to pick up critically injured Negroes.) A Negro is welcome to shop in almost any Southern department store, but in most he may not try on a suit until he buys it.

A Negro may give a white panhandler a handout but he may not follow him into a bar with the sign, “Whites only.” He may attend the graduate schools of state universities (about 1,000 do), but he may not attend undergraduate colleges—with some exceptions (e.g., University of Louisville, University of Delaware). In such schools Negro and white students get on without friction, and form friendships; but the Negroes, while they eat with whites, may not belong to white fraternities—but they are allowed to attend dances as guests.

In many important industries of the South, e.g., Haspel, Chrysler, International Harvester, Glenn Martin, Firestone Tire & Rubber, Negroes work side by side with whites (only South Carolina still has a law requiring segregation in work areas). Union meetings are nonsegregated, but some locals have raised hell when union headquarters ordered an end to segregated toilet facilities. But in one plant near Atlanta, when the “colored” and “white” signs over the fountains wore out, nobody bothered to repaint them, and segregation for drinking stopped. (But if someone had protested formally that it should stop, it would unquestionably have been furiously enforced.)

Struggle in the Soul

Mob violence is rare. The year 1952 was the first without a single reported lynching. Many of the South’s “better people,” who for years tacitly condoned the Klan, have now abandoned it. It is socially as safe to back antimask bills as it was once to take hot broth to an ailing Mammy’s cabin.

The principle that Negroes must have “separate but equal” facilities* was an empty phrase a decade ago; today, it is rapidly becoming reality. Most Southerners feel that unless they make “separate but equal” a fact, the courts are sure to saddle them with “whole hog” rulings, i.e., complete equality. Many states are hastily building fine new Negro schools and hospitals, although from a purely economic standpoint, “separate but equal” schools are insanely wasteful. Most Southerners no longer sneer at the educated Negro as “biggety”; many want to help the Negro get a better education, better jobs and better housing, and let the rest take care of itself.

However, some Southerners are afraid that this formula may prove too little and too late. Southerners complain that there are too many “whole hog or nothing” Negroes. This is only partly true. No Southern Negro seriously wants or expects complete equality overnight. But all Southern Negroes want it as an ultimate goal—and they want to see faster progress towards that goal. They have become suspicious of “gradualism.” They want to know, as one Negro leader puts it: “When does Old Man Gradualism run out?” The Southern Negro’s mood may be summed up by the case of the successful Negro attorney in Birmingham who recently built a new home. “Look at it,” says a friend. “Look where it is. Over there, on Dynamite Hill. You don’t build a $35,000 house in that location—unless you are a Negro and haven’t got a better place to build it. Some say he wanted to wait, hoping that maybe better areas would open up. But he wanted to live in that house before he died. So he built it.”

Southern customs are still largely based on the assumption that the Negro is an inferior being. But that assumption lacks the pseudo-scientific backing it still had a generation ago. For decades, the South’s preoccupation with the Negro was a kind of cushion against reality, a diversion from the facts of poverty and stagnation. Southern “poor whites” had nothing if they could not feel superior to the Negro. During the past ten years, the South has been caught up in a great industrial boom; reality has become a little easier to face.

Although many Southerners today will agree that segregation is wrong in principle, the vast majority still fiercely defends it as right in practice. A mass of state laws and city ordinances enforces it. But Southerners seem to know in their hearts that it is not really defensible, and that the tide of events is against it. The result is a war in the South’s own soul which many Northerners, who see the South only as stubborn and narrow-minded, fail to understand. A Southern Negro and former slave understood it. Said Booker T. Washington, the greatest Negro leader in U.S. history: “The outside world does not know . . . the struggle that is constantly going on in the hearts of both the Southern white people and their former slaves . . . While both races are thus struggling, they should have the sympathy, the support, and the forbearance of the rest of the world.”

The Spirit: Hopes and Headaches

The Negro has suffered more than any other group of Americans. He has seen the white man at his worst, and he might have turned cynically against the white man’s faith and values. But he has not. The Negro does feel bitter about his lot. But it is a bitterness greatly modified by hope, patience and humor. Negro intellectuals occasionally talk “African nationalism.” But the majority of U.S. Negroes feel no more kinship to the Kikuyu of Kenya than to the man in the moon. They want to be, above all, Americans.

The most spectacular illustration of the Negroes’ loyalty to the U.S. is the Communists’ crashing failure to win recruits among them: by FBI estimates, no more than 1,400 Negroes ever belonged to the Communist Party at one time. Dr. Carlton Goodlett, young San Francisco Negro leader, gives these reasons: “More than anyone else, the Negro believes in the American opportunity to better himself. The Communist he sees as a rundown, underprivileged guy. The Negro just isn’t interested in the underdog role. Secondly, he has learned to believe in the right to protest. People like myself, always protesting against injustice, wouldn’t last ten seconds in Russia. Also, no single group in this country believes more strongly in God and the hereafter. The Negro doesn’t want to catch hell on this side of the River Styx and on the other side too.” A Negro lawyer put it this way: “It’s bad enough to be black without being Red too.” The Negro is still deeply religious, although American churches have been slow in fighting discrimination before the altar. Says Marie Johnson, wife of Fisk University’s President Charles Johnson: “I think we got the best out of Christianity, because we had to have it. No matter how we may scoff, we believe . . . Still, 11 o’clock Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of American life.”

There are fewer outstanding Negro leaders on the national scene today than ever before. Negro leaders have found that, as their people’s status improves, the business of leadership gets tougher. Walter White, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, recalls that back in the days when there were three or four lynchings a year, it was a lot easier to raise funds than now. A great Negro leader, the late James Weldon Johnson, once said that leadership was a form of escape; by this he meant that “Negro spokesmen” might gain a lot of prestige by making speeches and gathering personal followings, but did not really accomplish very much. Today’s Negro leader concentrates on getting things done on specific issues. Emancipated to a large extent from the white professional liberals and their pet slogan, “education,” he tries, for instance, to get a court ruling on segregation in Pullmans instead of trying to “educate” millions of individual Pullman passengers. Today’s Negro leader does not want to be known as a firebrand; the compliment he prizes most is to be called “a good tactician.” One symptom of this change is the fact that Booker T. Washington, a superb tactician whom most Negro leaders in the ’20s and ’30s denounced as an “Uncle Tom,” is being rediscovered by Negroes as a great man.

The Negro still cannot forget his ‘color. Negro writers and artists wish that they could be craftsmen first and Negroes second, but they find it virtually impossible. Yet more & more Negroes are impatient with spirituals and the blues (including the literary form of the blues, also known as the novel of protest). Many intelligent Negroes are plainly eager to stop looking at every problem through colored glasses. One interesting symptom: Negroes used to have a kind of secret slang— which, as one Negro writer puts it, was “like a tattoo on your wrist”; it has now all but disappeared. Says Negro Photographer Gordon Parks: “There is this pressure to make good for your whole people. If you fail, they give you a black eye. But a while back, I made up my mind, from now on it’s just going to be me. If I want to fail, that’s my business. You can’t walk around with your race piled on your back.” He adds thoughtfully, with the persistent doubt that even the most optimistic Negro seems unable to escape: “Anyway, that’s what I tell my kids. Maybe I’m just bluffing myself.”

Indications are that, as the Negro shares the white man’s privileges and opportunities, he also shares his headaches. Sa,ys a Negro newspaperman: “When the Negro had less freedom, he could blame the whites for whatever went wrong with him. Now it’s harder for him to blame the whites for his failures.” Says Negro Novelist Ralph (Invisible Man) Ellison: “After a man makes $10,000 or $20,000 a year, the magic fades. He is just another man with his problems.” Most Negroes still wish they had that kind of problem, but many will agree with Ellison that “we are all Americans together, all modern men together. And we’re all facing the same spiritual crisis.”

Perhaps the Negro’s most serious problem is that, as he gets more of the fruits of the tree of life, his appetite increases. Explains a Manhattan Negro social worker: “A Negro laborer living in Harlem and rarely peering beyond the boundaries of his ghetto might be reasonably content; but if he gets a good job downtown, mixes with white people on a more or less equal basis, and then in the evening is forced to go home to a miserable house in Harlem, he will be bitterly discontented.” Says a Negro philosopher, Dr. Alain Locke of Howard University: “The old slum is no longer the problem. It’s the new, respectable slum that worries us. We call it Striver’s Row.” As Negroes move into Striver’s Row, their bitterness at remaining inequalities will mount. At the same time, white resentment of growing Negro ambition may mount too.

The Future: Liability or Opportunity?

Justice has been imagined by mankind in many different shapes. Could it be that her face is black or brown? That, at any rate, is the way she is likely to appear to the majority of the world’s people, whose skins are colored. They are the people, in Asia and in Africa, whom the U.S. hopes to lead to democracy. They judge the U.S. very largely on evidence drawn from the “Negro problem.” The U.S. has probably won more enemies by stories, true and false, about its treatment of Negroes than by any other propaganda; but many Negroes feel that the U.S. could be winning friends instead. Just how much individual Negroes have done to win friends for the U.S. is almost never realized: they have been effective both in the diplomatic service (which so far employs only a handful—about 60) and in personal contacts at Negro universities like Howard, where young people from Africa and Asia come to learn about the U.S. Says Novelist Richard (Native Son) Wright: “The key to Asia is right there in Harlem and on Chicago’s South Side.”

The Negro problem is basically not economic, or social, or psychological. It is moral. Prejudice does more moral harm to those who harbor it than to those who are hit by it. And the most hopeful fact about the Negro’s progress in the last decade is that it could not have been possible without some moral progress by white Americans.

Gunnar Myrdal explained the U.S.’s state of mind on the Negro problem more succinctly and movingly than anyone else: “The ordinary American is the opposite of a cynic. He is on the average more of a believer and a defender of the faith in humanity than the rest of the Occidentals . . . He investigates his faults, puts them on record, and shouts them from the housetops . . . America’s handling of the Negro problem has been criticized most emphatically by white Americans . . . and the criticism . . . will not stop until America has completely reformed itself . . . Mankind is sick of fear and disbelief . . . If America in actual practice could show the world [that] the Negro became finally integrated into modern democracy, all mankind would be given faith again . . . and America would have spiritual power many times stronger than all her financial and military resources—the power of the trust and support of all good people on earth. America is free to choose whether the Negro shall remain her liability or become her opportunity.”

*First stated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. *E.g., ofay (any white man), Mr. Charlie, Miss Anne (Southern whites).