A Negro Speaks for His People

by J. SAUNDERS REDDING

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FOR a dozen years deep change has been taking place in the mind of the Negro toward the racial situation in the South. The change has not been secret, being evidenced in a number of ways; but activated by the general ferment of the war, it now looms gargantuan before the crisis-stirred consciousness of the white South. That the change assumes the reputation and the proportions of a catastrophe to those who have not followed its manifestations is due to its peculiar relation to the war and to the kind of war this is.

Now at a time when peoples all over the world are all inning the concept of equality, the Negro, too, in America is affirming with strong voice that the rights fundamental to all men shall no longer be denied him. And the sound of that voice avowing change is dreadful to the white South.

There had been warnings to the South long before the unmistakable sound of the voice was heard. Perhaps the earlier warnings were not clear, or perhaps the liberals who interpret for the South and to the South misunderstood them. Or perhaps, because separately a great many of the incidents were minor, the liberals did not notice them at. all. The fact that an old Southern-trained Negro college teacher of sociology is replaced by a Negro trained at Chicago under Park and Burgess does not make headlines. News of Negro students revolting because they think one of their white teachers incompetent and prejudiced never gets to the white South at all. The boycott of a chain grocery store because it employed an all-white staff in a Negro neighborhood in Atlanta is only of passing interest. Few of the interpreters for the South know the name of Clinton Clark, but lie is the Louisiana Negro who organized the bi-racial Louisiana Tenant Fanners and Sharecroppers Committee; or of Ben Man gum, the white man who did the same in Southeastern Missouri. These “minor” incidents have been happening in the South for ten years.

There are also events of greater magnitude* In the first place, the old Negro leadership in the South was outstripped by its (theoretical) following. The old leadership had been chosen and maintained by the white South because it was too weak to make encroachments upon the basic assumption of Negro inferiority or upon the racial status quo. The old leadership was maintained because it. threatened no change and no essential modification of the mores of the South. In Brown America, Edwin Embrce gives an illustration: “In one town all of the prominent white people sing the praises of the principal of the local high school. You visit, his school and, while he is holding a class, a telephone call comes. He excuses himself saying that the county superintendent has just called him up and wants him to come over and plow in his garden.”

Such a leadership could not make the transition from the imperatives of one cultural level to those of another. The white South did not wish it to. It was a leadership meant to be effective for progress in a world in which black would remain forever unequal to white. It was too frequently a chidden, threatened leadership, entirely dependent upon the capricious will and largess of white men. To the extent that it remains, it still is.

In Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on January 1, 1943, a shotgun blast killed one white man and wounded two others. The murder was attributed to race trouble and “a nearriot ensued.” It happens that the town is the seat of a state college for Negroes, and it seems more than incidental that a political writer for the Raleigh Evening Times should report in his column for January 7 that “rumors connecting the recent near-riot in Elizabeth City and the State Teachers College for Negroes have reached the Advisory Budget Committee and may hurt the chances of getting badly needed funds.”

That the implication of guilty connivance is preposterous needs no comment. The item has a much wider significance. It exemplifies not only an old technique of control but the middle-class Southern whites’ resistance to any change even in the conditions of the race problem — since, as a problem, they see it as immutable. Governor Dixon of Alabama recently refused a Federal contract for his state on the ground that its provision against discrimination in employment was a threat to the ways of the South.

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The Negro has learned to distrust the proclaimed good-will of the articulate Southern whites, even the liberals; he has long since distrusted the strength of his old leaders.

Another occurrence, of increasing weight in the total situation, is that the Negro in the South is awaking to the class aspect of the race problem. Some Southern liberals are aware of this, among them Jonathan Daniels, who implies that the awakening is due to the fact that the white liberals, like the old Negro leaders, have been asleep, leaving the Negro to his own devices. His devices, in the persons of regenerate Southerners like the Reverend Samuel Franklin, whom Mr. Daniels describes, Communists, members of the CIO, Coöperators, and assorted Farm Unionists, have led him to an ideological point of view from which he sees the race problem stripped of the old, frayed, romantic disguises. It should be no secret even to the reactionary that the Negro’s awakening is also the depressed white man’s awakening. The depressed white man in the South is awaking only to discover that both he and the Negro were drugged by the same mystical potion of hate, of race struggle, of playing poor laboring black against poor laboring white. He is discovering also that there is much to join him to the Negro.

John Temple Graves, a liberal from Alabama, cites an important figure. He says that there are 30,000 Negro members of the CIO in Alabama. What he does not say is more important: that a large percentage of these Alabama Negro union members are in bi-racial locals, and that some of these locals have some Negro officials. A white acquaintance of mine who was with the War Labor Board in a legal capacity cites the instance of a white man who had just joined a miners’ local in war-flushed Birmingham. The man had no way of knowing that the local was bi-racial until it was necessary to have his card signed. He went into the local’s office, where there were several men sitting around , and asked for the secretary, He was shown the open door of a cubbyhole, and there behind a littered desk sat a Negro.

“I happened in at the exact time,” my acquaintance says, “looking for a hearing witness. And you should have seen this feller’s eyes bug. He stood in the door and turned to look at these other men in the other room as if he thought somebody was playing a joke he didn’t like. ‘Say,’ he says, ‘do I have to have that feller sign my card?’ The men eyed him for a while, and then one of them, a sure-fire cracker-looking feller, says, ‘Sho’ do, if you want to git in, by Gawd. He’s a worker, like you an’ me.’ God, how I wished that feller was my witness!”

The South is learning the lesson taught a few months ago by R. J. Thomas, president of the United Automobile Workers, when he ordered back to work, under pain of expulsion from job and union, some Southern whites who struck in protest against, the employment of Negroes in a Wright aeronautical factory. They mean that the Negro is coming to have “a faith in organized labor as a force for social justice.” They mean what a Negro United Mine Workers official in West Virginia told me in 1940: “Let me tell you, buddy. Waking up is a damn sight harder than going to sleep, but we’ll stay woke up longer.”

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Let no one draw false inferences as to the present fullness and extent of this awakening. It is still possible for a politician to arouse prolonged cheers from an audience in Georgia (or Alabama or Mississippi or Texas) by declaring, “As long as I am your Governor no Negro foremen will give orders to white men and women in the mills of this state. . . . I am proud to be called the champion of White Supremacy.” It is still possible for a lawyer in Birmingham to project the formation of a league to protect the white man’s exclusive rights.

It is still standard for the Negro president of an important vocational college to be called “Boy” by white farmers who come to see and to learn the most recent development in plant pest control. It remains normal for the Negro to be told to go to the back of the bus, the store, and the line of march; for him to be shut out of unions and kept out of jobs and legislated out of voting. “Sure,” the Governor quoted above said, “the Negro has a place. And that place is at the back door. There is no other place for him.” But it becomes less the custom for Negroes in the South to accept that place, to grin and bear it, for though the majority have never heard of the Northern Negro “agitators” or the “radical” Negro press, or the CIO, or the Delta Coöperatives, or the Committee on Fair Employment Practice, they have heard that we are fighting a war for something and they have felt the cosmic stirring of the little peoples.

Though the majority of Negroes have never heard of the efforts of certain “radical” groups and men to ameliorate their condition, one must not dismiss those efforts. Certainly the bi-racial Sharecroppers Union, which Clinton Clark said had 37,000 members in 1940, is having some effect. There must be some strength of spirit in the Southern Tenant Farmers Union, one of whose meetings I attended in Arkansas. (There were only twentyone whites and nine Negroes present, but they were all the white and Negro members in the district.) One can only speculate as to the depth of the influence of the CIO and whether it is just narrowly class-conscious or broadly liberalizing. One cannot be certain of the effects upon youth of the American Youth Congress and the American Student Union, but there are effects, and the Negro is feeling them.

All this activity of movements and men is expressed in the sound of the voice that seems to come exclusively from the North, but it is not the hatch of Northern Negro “agitators,” “pushing the country closer and closer to an interracial explosion,” as Mr. Dabney said in the January Atlantic. It is thought in the white South to be the hatch of the Negro North because the Negro South has forgot its “ place ” and is not acting like the Negro South. The voice seems to come from the North because the North has always been the mouth to cry Change — and the Negro North has always been the tongue of the black South.

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Several years ago, when the name of W. E. B. Du Bois was taken in some quarters as the byword of race radicalism, I heard a Southern Negro leader upbraid a young student for his enthusiasm for Dr. Du Bois. After a long and rather abusive harangue, he suddenly demanded of the student, “Why do you like Du Bois anyway? Don’t you know he’s impractical?” “I like him ‘cause he speaks his piece without hemming and hawing,” the student answered.

There were two truths implicit in this dialogue. One was that the Negro North frequently spoke the common mind of the Negro South; and the other, that the Negro North was sometimes visionary. But if the Negro North was sometimes fanciful, then the white South’s literalness was often peonage and worse; and to what was visionary fifteen years ago, new, powerful, human forces have given a look of reasonableness, while a great deal of the South’s “practicality” seems reactionary blindness.

The South has long been insulated. Resistance to change is one of its chief regional characteristics. What Howard Odum, one of the South’s greatest sociologists, said ten years ago is true today: there are “more articulate movements and attitudes advocating the turning of the clock backward” than there are of any other kind.

Since change comes hard in the South, the South could not know, or chose not to know, what was happening in the North and to the Negro. The Texas primary election fight, the equal pay campaign, the Supreme Court decision in the Gaines case, did not tell it. It fought these occurrences — and all the harder because it did not understand them; but though they happened in the South, they were of the North, and as such were taken for the aberrations of psychopathic individuals who wanted to destroy the social structure of the South. This is the Southern attitude.

And indeed, what was happening in the North ? The gusty implementation of a strange political philosophy was being effected. It unleashed amorphous forces to counteract the collapse of the rugged individualists’ familiar philosophy of abundance. It expounded a theory of leveling and reshaped the prerogatives of privileged men into the rights of all men. It hinted of miracles of “people’s plenty.” It abandoned tradition. It restated the relations of man to government and of man to man in solid, hopeful terms. The New Deal was happening.

In this new deal the Negro in the North got a better hand than he had ever held before. He also played it better. He had something to play for, and he finessed his hand just enough to win. The things the Negro won were perhaps inconsequential to those who had long had them — a Federal judgeship, county and municipal judgeships, government advisory posts, legislative seats, appointments to West Point and Annapolis — but they were a clear promise that democracy for him was not dead. His tongue began to speak with the authority and in the accents of the new dispensation.

The tongue gives voice to a new Negro leadership North and South. Actually, traceably, it is a leadership newly created from a complex of conditions arising in the South — the weakness of old leaders, the inertia of those old leaders’ white patrons, the labor activity along bi-racial lines, and the development of class-consciousness. Rut the most important respect in which this leadership is new is in its thoroughgoing representativeness. A. Philip Randolph is president of a labor organization with a membership close to 10,000. Walter White has seen the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, of which he is secretary, grow from seventy member chapters to five hundred with a total membership well above 15,000. Max Yergan, president of the National Negro Congress, claims 15,000 for his group. The National Urban League, of which Lester Granger is secretary, has affiliates in fifty cities.

It is no wonder that these men can speak to audiences of 20,000 in New York, 18,000 in Chicago, 7000 in St. Louis, and to hundreds in Baltimore and Boston, Richmond, Memphis, and New Orleans. Even in their best days, when agricultural and mechanical training for Negroes was insisted on as the solution for the race problem, when frock coat and “white folks” were sign and symbol of the Negro’s success — even in those days the old leaders could command no such audiences as these. These new men are backed by organized followings almost exclusively of Negroes. In their aims, they are backed by the will of peoples all over the world, including the will of the Southern Negro.

For even the leading Southern Negroes, who have “fortunately taken matters into their own hands,” and in whom reposed the Southern whites’ hopes of “producing something which will appeal to forward-looking white Southerners as in the best interest of the whole South, ” — I am again quoting Mr. Dabney, — are a part of that exerting will. On October 17, 1942, the Norfolk Journal and Guide, undoubtedly the Negro South’s own paper and in Southern white judgment “one of the sanest and best-edited colored papers in the United States,” put it bluntly: —

They [Southern liberals] want the Negro to adjourn all discussions of equality of opportunity, or of inclusion in the processes of change, or of holding on to the gains already made. . . . We can understand the confusion in the minds of Southern liberals when they read statements . . . which set forth objectives in language that is, at least, impolitic. We can understand how they discern a difference in goals as well as a difference in methods of attaining them, as between Northern Negroes and Southern Negroes. Fundamentally, the goals are the same. The Negro wants a chance to work at any job for which his training and abilities qualify him. He wants to become a member of a union as a craftsman. . . . He wants to vote and participate in his government after meeting the requirements set up for citizens of other races. He wants to serve his country in war as a civilian as well as a soldier. He wants the stigma of implacable JimCrowism in its barbarous impact upon every phase of his life removed.

Last October some of these leading Southern Negroes met in a conference which the articulate whites hoped would provide an “antidote for the inflammatory agitation by Negro extremists.” In December the policy-making committee of that conference issued a statement about which the Journal and Guide commented editorially: —

Up to this time the Southern Negro has not spoken in tones and in terms that clearly defined his position. There is the assumption that the Southern Negro is leaving the case entirely in the hands of his Northern brethren. This is not true. In the current statement a representative group of Southern Negroes speak for themselves, and in clear terms they make it known that they are not in accord wilh any thinking concerning the war period, or the post-war period, that contemplates no change or improvement in the . . . second-class citizenship rating of the Negro.

The committee’s declaration makes this clear:

We are fundamentally opposed to the principle and practice of compulsory segregation in our American society, whether of races or classes or creeds; however, we regard it as both sensible and timely to address ourselves now to the current problems of racial discrimination and neglect and to ways in which we may cooperate in the advancement of programs aimed at the sound improvement of race relations within the democratic framework.

Ten years ago this declared opposition to custom would have been impossible. Ten or even five years ago Negroes did not issue statements on race relations and race policy without first submitting them to a group of “liberal white friends” for advisement. The declaration must have sounded treasonable to the South. None of the old shibboleths here, no truckling to expediency. No indication hero that settlement will be what it always was for the old Negro leaders — the white man’s settlement. Nothing here to gladden the hearts and quiet the minds of those who believe that the Negro South is being misled out of conformity to lhe outworn Southern pattern by Northern agitators. This statement of policy runs sharply counter to any based on the maintenance of a concept of inferior and superior races.

It is pertinent to point out a further step the Southern Race Relations Conference took. In a sentence which seems to be a chiding of those who either will not or cannot see that the righting of inequalities in a democracy is no alarum to internal war and no threat to the violation of the sacred ness of the home, the Conference says: “We regard it as unfortunate that the simple efforts to correct obvious social and economic injustices continue, with such considerable support, to be interpreted as the predatory ambition of irresponsible Negroes to invade the privacy of family life.”

This last was as necessary as the other was fundamental, for there is need to deny the white South’s conception of social equality. Everyone knows what that conception is. Its apothegm is the question, Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro? Of course no Negro takes a view of equality relatively so short and unimportant as this. Neither North nor South expects a breakdown in the tradition of segregation that will go this way. No government regulation or intercession could do it. The idea is completely a bugaboo. No Negro suggests it. What is suggested is that the repeal of the laws of segregation is a necessary step in a completer realization of the dream of democracy, and that it is particularly now a timely step when we are fighting a war and asking others to fight a war on the premise of the equality of peoples in a free world.

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The outstripping and supplanting of outworn Negro leaders, the effects of the growing class-consciousness on the race problem, the tremendous pressure of world forces generating the global war, the war itself for the equality of peoples — all these taken together are a stupendous challenge to the South. It is a challenge to her customs, her isolation, her insulation. It is a challenge to her oft-repeated belief that the South is a different world and that the South can handle her own problem alone. In its minimum meaning, it is a challenge to the South to keep, if she must, the present facilities for bi-racial living, excepting only the dodges that prevent the Negroes’ exercise of the ballot, drop the discriminatory practices that make those facilities for Negroes inferior to those for white, let the Negroes work at any job they can do, then abolish compulsory segregation. Trust the slow yeasting of unprejudiced, knowledge — and see what happens. “Let the people work!” It is a challenge to change!

I repeat, this is a war for change. On our side, the United Peoples’ side, it is a revolutionary struggle for the equality of peoples. There was a time when some believed we could stay out of it. The rest of us were somehow touched and aware and finally unified by the spirit that makes our common humanity. Even if we could have stayed out of the war, this spirit, this cohesive force, would have touched us; and it would have affected the South and the Negro, and there would have been racial tension.

But we did not stay out, ostensibly because of Pearl Harbor, but actually because We had to help fight this war in order to save the moral prestige of democracy — not our democracy, but the well-loved cosmic spirit of the thing upon which we rest as a people. Had we stayed out, we should have snuffed the spark of hope in the hearts of millions of people and cast deep shadow over the democratic ideal.

We can still do this even now that we are in the war and even though we win the war. As Wendell Wiilkie has said, it makes a lot of difference how we win. In pledging a war against the Fascist we have pledged to wipe racialism and the threat of racialism from the earth. We have made the corner of our creed the proposition that men are equal. The ethnic theories of our enemies have forced this inevitably upon us. This is the realistic moral issue. If we evade this issue and win, we are lost — as much as if we lose the military victory. If this war ceases to be the kind of war that supports, enlivens, and helps fulfill this proposition — and there is growing danger that it might so cease — and becomes just another war to defeat a nation or a group of nations, then we are lost.

The creed of the war is also our creed of government. In the face of the danger of selfdefeat it seems a small thing to ask that we live now by a creed which we voluntarily adopted. It is not an easy and a conservative creed. It was never meant to be. But the test of the strength and the durability, the humanity and the godliness, of our way of life is whether we live by it now. This is also the test of the righteousness of the war the peoples wage. There is no refuge in conservatism. There is no road back from liberalism except to a precipice. The road lies ahead, and we built it. It is our right and our duty to lead the way along it.