So far as I know, no one from the outside has ever tried to infect the Negro group with fascism. There have been some inside the group, but, excepting Marcus Garvey, I do not think they were consciously fascist. Negro colleges have tended to breed fascism—I would say a mild form of it, except that fascism is organically hysterical and there is no mild form of it—and I have met Negro college presidents whose notions are provocative of suspicious wonder and who, by the way they run “their” institutions, seem to be convinced that the methods of democracy are weak and decadent. Themselves, generally, victims of a tyranny imposed from without, they are tyrants within the academic group, and, if given a chance, outside it too. They play the strong man and the dictator role. They think that people and things should be “lined up” by the superior intellects with which they feel their positions endow them. They have a vast contempt for faculty members whom they regard as justly underprivileged employees perhaps of somewhat more value than janitors but of considerably less value than football coaches.

More dangerously, this presidential contempt engulfs students, who grow into maturity with personalities habituated to submission and who are likely to believe in the infallibility of the dictatorship principle. In general, Negro-educated Negroes have never learned to live with Freedom and this is why they are almost totally missing from the ranks of those who apply the privileges and the tools of democracy to the construction of Freedom’s spacious house. Where they have taken over as leaders of Negro communities there rises a nauseating reek of devious and oily obsequiousness. It is a kind of fascism in reverse.

A group of Negro parents in a Virginia city wished to equalize the facilities of the Negro school with those of white schools. One of the things that the colored school lacked was a cafeteria. This was particularly noticeable because the city school board had just added such a convenience (at a cost of $20,000) to the only white school without it. The Negro parents went to the principal of their own school. As an ambitious and hard-working educator, less complacent and timeserving than most of his type, he had ideas, and the chief one was that the parents’ group solicit funds (he thought $2,500 would do it!) in Negro homes, churches, and other racial institutions. By a show of initiative and energy, he thought, it might be brought home to the white people that Negro citizens were worthy of consideration.

Naturally among those to whom the project was first presented was the Negro acknowledged as the colored community’s leader—a lawyer, graduate of a Negro college and a white law school. The esteem he commanded among his own people and the attention he could get from the whites were very real.

A friend of mine happened to be in the lawyer’s office when the committee of parents went there. Whether out of boorishness, as my friend thinks, or because of the very human desire to prove his influence, or because he clearly saw his duty as a leader, the lawyer took over completely. “We’ll get in touch with some real money,” he said. “No point in piddling around with the colored folks’ two cents’ worth.” Then, picking up the telephone, he called several of his white “friends”—a peanut-produce manufacturer (he carefully identified them between calls), a banker and an insurance broker, among others—and explained to them the Negro parents’ project for the school. In ten minutes of “the most consummate fawning,” my friend said afterward, the lawyer had solicited pledges of more than a thousand dollars. He typed out an identifying statement for the parents and sent them off to collect from his white friends.

My friend said she watched openmouthed during this masterly performance. “It was like being at the theater, when you’re so struck by the skill of the star that you don’t think of the play itself until after the curtain falls. Or maybe it isn’t skill that strikes you. Maybe it’s personality. I remember Katharine Cornell in —— Well, it was exactly like that,” my friend said, with something very like awe in her voice and in her pale face. She recovered after the curtain had fallen.

“Mr. So-and-So,” she asked, “do you mean to tell me you’re begging white people in this community to give you things that everybody ought to have and that you have as much right to as they? This is 1951! Haven’t you heard what’s going on—the legal suits for equalization and all?”

“Oh,” the lawyer said, laughing blandly, “they don’t want to sue. They just want a cafeteria like the white schools have.”

Thurgood Marshall, chief legal counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has said that the hardest job his staff has had in bringing equal-education suits has been to persuade Negro teachers and representative Negro parents to stand as plaintiffs. They have to be bludgeoned out of their childish faith in the short-term profits of their minority middle-class position. They have to be taught, with pain and patience, that democracy is a legitimate enterprise, that its institutions must make for their dignity, and that they cannot save themselves without forgetting themselves in the struggle to save the rights of man. Negro colleges are doing almost none of this teaching.^[9]

What I am trying to make clear is the actual condition of the average middle-class American Negro mind halfway through the twentieth century. To explain how this condition came about would involve a good deal of history. Besides, I have already tried to explain it in another place. The only point is that the condition does exist, and it is not healthy. Nor can it be cured, it seems to me, by the superficial therapy of integration on special levels—the graduate and professional-school level, for instance—which is now being hailed as a cure-all. It is not. Integration on this level is at best a victory for the method of democracy, and method and spirit are not necessarily one. For years upper middle-class American Negroes have been going to graduate and professional schools with whites without learning, and without stimulating by their presence there, the inclusive kind of thinking that is necessary to the fulfillment of the spirit of democracy. Associations on such levels are as casual and random as the flow of unchanneled waters. They do not bite deep into idea patterns, nor thrust themselves down into the matrix of emotion.

Integration must start at much lower levels—in kindergarten and Sunday school, in Cub Scouts and Campfire Girls—before idea patterns are fixed and before the matrix of emotion is stuffed with the corruption of intolerance. Integration must be complete and absolutely without “ifs,” “ands” and “buts.” Eventually, of course, from these levels it would proceed to intermarriage. But what harm then? It is not entirely facetious to say that legal intermarriage would only sanction and somewhat equalize the miscegenation that has been going on in this country since 1622 when, it is said, the first child of mixed Negro-white parentage was born in America. And to say that intermarriage between American Negroes and whites would increase the vitality of the American people is biologically sound.

Fortunately integration is not a political concept (though it has been made a political issue) and is therefore not identified with the name of a leader. This has the advantage of depriving the opposition of that damaging leverage of vulnerable personality which leadership identification always provides and which can destroy or throw into long-lasting paralysis even the most salutary and easily defended social concepts. If you cannot overthrow the ideas which you fear or hate, then attack the man behind the ideas and thus debase what he stands for. That is the history of the struggle against ideas.

But if the concept of integration has this advantage, it has also the disadvantage of being indivisible. There is no decalogue of integration, each item of which can be separately assimilated and practiced. It is not a “one thing at a time” thing, nor a “first things first” thing. It must be assimilated all at once or killed all at once.

And it is this fact, I think, that frightens Negroes of the more stable classes. They see in integration a breakdown of certain monopolies in education and the professions and some business enterprises. In my own home town, for instance, where segregation could have been abolished twenty years ago, the Negro owner of the only Negro theater, who was at the same time on the city council, fought every attempt to wipe out the practice of excluding Negroes from white theaters, indoor sporting events, and other places of entertainment. He could get aid and comfort from a Negro school principal and certain Negro teachers who were afraid that the ell would lead to the mile and that their jobs would be thrown into an open nonracial competition which they were not prepared, they felt, to meet.

But also integration is in conflict with all that whites as well as Negroes have been taught to believe. It is in conflict with all that they think of as making for harmonious social development. Most whites are convinced that integration is the way to social and even biological disaster. Conviction is emotional and generally not to be argued with. If segregationalists could be argued with, they would not be segregationalists in the first place. They have taken their position on nonarguable grounds, and I think they have taken it quite contrary to their intellectual understanding of the problem central to our age. The Georgia Legislature, in this year 1951, was very sincere when it saw fit to pass a bill providing that no funds appropriated for education could go to institutions that did not enforce segregation. Only weeks later, Governor Byrnes of South Carolina, who has been a Senator, a Supreme Court Justice and Secretary of State, declared that “The politicians in Washington and the Negro agitators in North Carolina who today seek to abolish segregation in all schools will learn that what a carpetbag government could not do in the Reconstruction Period cannot be done in this period.” He then proceeded to express the view that before what “could not be done” would be done, the public-school system in South Carolina would be abolished.^[10]

This is paradox and irony. There is the obvious irony of advocating the abolishment of the very thing on which democracy must rest—a publicly schooled citizenry—in order to ensure, as Byrnes implied, the perpetuation of democracy. But the paradox goes deeper, for if there is emotionalism in Byrnes’s words, there is also the opposite of emotionalism. For his words represent a deliberate and a socially dominant response based on static concepts and ideals—the concept of the Negro’s inherent inferiority, and the ideal of the white “Anglo-Saxon,” predominantly Protestant community which earns its right to Divine favor because it contributes to Negro causes, does not deliberately encourage the persecution of either Jews or Catholics, and even occasionally permits itself the hazard of proclaiming the world one.

That the concept of complete integration, which seems to me to represent the logical evolution of democratic thinking, should be in deep conflict with the actualities of American learning (I will not say “teaching”) is the supreme paradox of our democracy. The central problem of our age is that of expressing the oneness of man. The UNESCO “Statement on Race” makes this abundantly clear: “The unity of mankind from both the biological and social viewpoints is the main thing. To recognize this and to act accordingly is the first requirement of modern man.” Admittedly Americans and a goodly portion of the peoples of the Western world believe that democracy is the frame—and perhaps the only frame—within which unity can be achieved and maintained. They must believe this, else their propagandic and materialistic promotion of it, their assiduous and even frantic efforts to “sell” it to the rest of the world is basically an immoral and selfish offering of the democratic experience to mankind at the price of man’s soul. In so far as the American people, who lead the Western world, believe that democracy is the enduring frame of unity, then they must flatter themselves with a belief in a great destiny. And this is all very well, but they must also realize that Western democratic civilization has arrived at the point at which the path of development proper to man and necessary to democracy is marked “Integration.” If it is not chosen now, then the American people must reform their wants, modify detrusively their ideals, and deliberately dissolve those organic bonds of principle which give the ultimate meaning to democracy. They must stop being moved by the symbols “the inalienable rights of man,” “the pursuit of happiness,” “liberty” and “equality,” and enshrine, instead of these symbols of man’s hope, those of fear—survival, collective security. The journey down the path of integration is not one to be put off until tomorrow. Tomorrow is now.

I do not wish to push this too far, but there can be little doubt that integration is a practical concern latent in our modern world. It is no preposterous idealism offered merely in contravention of a prevailing view and practices that are working for most men. The simple truth is that the prevailing practices are not working for most men. While at the same time his conscience is disturbed by this fact, Western man is so fixed in the once-comfortable conviction of his own superiority that he seems powerless to change the practices that support his conviction. This is a fault of his adolescence. It is a cavalier unconcern for his lack of knowledge of others. It is an inability to understand the world society of which he is a part. “World society” is no longer a metaphysical abstraction. It is very real, very concrete. It is real enough to have reduced the margin for national initiative in the conduct of internal affairs. It is no longer possible for the United States to keep the differences she has made between the races—and embedded in law and custom—without making a fundamental denial of what she professes before the world to stand for and to fight for, the entity of mankind.