While I am in a petulant mood, let me say that I am race-conscious enough to be shocked and irritated frequently by what even professed white friends do not know, on both the personal and historical level, about Negroes. There is a glaring case in point.

During her husband’s administration, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt became acquainted with a black, bosomy and intensely dynamic woman named Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune. The Negro woman was then Deputy Administrator of NYA, and through her the President’s wife, a sincere and fearless woman, got closely involved with the race problem. The white South fretted over the spectacle of Mrs. Roosevelt being shepherded through the intricate mazes of racial and interracial affairs. It was alleged (and the South, as did Negroes everywhere, took it for truth) that Mrs. Bethune, through Mrs. Roosevelt, had special rights to the President’s ear. She certainly seemed to have such rights to the ear of F.D.R.’s wife. More than one photograph shows the two women in earnest conversation in what seem to be intimate circumstances.

Mrs. Bethune is very much alive. She is frequently mentioned and pictured in the colored press. She is ex-president of the National Federation of Colored Women. She took a dominant part in a conference on old age at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington in 1950. She spoke at perhaps a half dozen major college commencements in 1951. But in her book This I Remember, written in 1949, Mrs. Roosevelt, after words of heartening warmth for the black woman, refers to her as “the late [dead, deceased!] Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune.” Mrs. Roosevelt’s reputation (earned at the cost of great personal criticism) for knowledge about and interest in Negroes, for liberalism, for social intelligence and tact is as a broad pen stroke underscoring the pattern of false belief and cavalier know-nothing-about-the-Negro attitude to which the majority conforms. Yet even she could make this error!

As an ideal, of course, I am all for the deletion of racial designations in newspaper stories and the like. But the ideal is nowhere near attainment. It seems that it is still a general practice in newsrooms in a large part of the country to specify race when Negroes are involved in crime, and it is still usual to omit, except from feature stories and special articles, racial designation in news copy that would reflect credit on the colored people. When Ralph Bunche stepped in as mediator of the Jewish-Arab dispute, the fact that he was an American Negro first broke in the foreign press. In spite of hundreds of front-page news stories from competent war correspondents, it is even now not generally known that the 24th Infantry, which fought so hard and bought with its life (it was almost totally destroyed) the time General MacArthur needed in the early fighting in Korea, was a Negro outfit in the segregated United States Army.

Personally, as matters stand, I would settle for something less than the ideal. Seldom does one see the minority-group designations “Italian,” “Greek,” “Jewish,” “Irish,” and the like attached to crime stories involving persons of these groups. But neither, it is replied, do you see them attached to other stories. True, and this is all very well. It is a matter of nomenclature. Negro names being what they generally are—as indigenous to America as “hot dog,” or as unmistakably Anglo-Saxon-derived as “Gudger”—Ralph Bunche and Charles Drew, William Hastie and George Dows Cannon might belong to any Anglo-Saxon, Protestant or Catholic. But no one of reading intelligence would mistake Bernard Baruch or Sholem Asch as of other than Jewish heritage, or Fiorello LaGuardia and Vincent Impellitteri as of other than Italian ancestry, or George Skouras as of other than Greek, or Roosevelt and Vanderbilt as other than Dutch, or William Cardinal O’Connell as other than Irish. We make these associations automatically, and there passes into the communal intelligence some sense of the contributions these groups make to American life. On the other hand, diffused throughout our national life and thought is the fallacy that the Negro has contributed nothing substantial.

Not to know the Negro on the group and historical level is to rob him of his pride and of his rightful share in the American heritage. He cannot claim what is his, except in an intorted and psychologically unhealthy way. The Negro on the lower levels saves himself from complete madness by following a pattern of neurotic expression that is patent in his lazy-lipped and mumbling speech, in his gay-bird dress, and in his prowlike walk. The Negro on the upper level turns back upon himself with a voracity of egocentrism that bewilders the casual observer. “What a self-conscious people your Negroes are!” a recent French visitor exclaimed. He was right. The Negro lives constantly on two planes of awareness. Watching the telecast of a boxing match between Ezzard Charles, the Negro who happened to be heavyweight champion, and a white challenger, a friend of mine said, “I don’t like Charles as a person [one level] but I’ve got to root for him to beat this white boy—and good [second level].”

One’s heart is sickened at the realization of the primal energy that goes undeflected and unrefined into the sheer business of living as a Negro in the United States—in any one of the United States. Negroness is a kind of superconsciousness that directs thinking, that dictates action, and that perverts the expression of instinctual drives which are salutary and humanitarian—the civic drive, for instance, so that in general Negroes are cynically indifferent to politics; the societal drive, so that ordinarily the Negro’s concern is only with himself as an individual; and even the sex and love drive, so that many Negroes suffer sexual maladjustments and many a Negro couple refuse to bear children who will “inevitably grow up under a burden of obloquy and shame that would daunt and degrade a race of angels.” It is impossible to believe with Lillian Smith that the psychological damage caused by the race situation in America is greater to whites than to Negroes. “Every one of us knows,” an internationally known Negro said recently, “that there is no ‘normal’ American Negro.” Public asylums for the mentally deranged offer a telling statistic. Though Negroes are something less than ten per cent of the country’s population, they are eleven per cent of the total population of public institutions for the insane.

Compulsively dissociated from the American tradition, the Negro on the upper level has had to maintain the pretense of possessing what he is in fact denied. He has had no choice but this. He has not been free to realize his ideals or to strive to be what the American tradition has made him wish to be. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, probably the most popular American poet at the turn of the century, did not wish to write “jingles in a broken tongue,” but he was Negro and as a Negro he had to write dialect or else have no hearing as a poet. James Weldon Johnson did not wish to compose those “darky” lyrics and “coon songs” for Williams and Walker’s and his own brother Rosamond’s shows—nor did Williams and Walker and Rosamond Johnson wish to sing them and caper to them. But how else were they to find outlets for their creative urges, when all of the more congenial and less particularized were dammed up against them? DuBois had ideas for a career other than the one he was compelled to follow. “Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me,” he wrote in Dusk of Dawn, “I should have probably been an unquestioning worshiper at the shrine of the social order and economic development into which I was born.... What was wrong was that I and people like me and thousands of others who might have my ability and aspiration, were refused permission to be a part of this world. It was as though moving on a rushing express, my main thought was as to the relations I had to other passengers on the express, and not to its rate of speed and its destination.... My attention from the first was focused... upon the problem of the admission of my people into the freedom of democracy.”^[12]

The dissociation of the Negro from the American tradition and the lack of knowledge of the Negro on the historical level are certainly in part the fault of social commentators and historians and social scholars. The historians particularly have been guilty of almost complete silence, like William A. Dunning; or of faulty investigation, like James Ford Rhodes; or of misinterpretation of the facts, like Ulrich Philips and W. E. Woodward; or of propaganda, like William E. Dodd and Jesse Carpenter; or of frank and determined anti-Negro bias, like dozens, major and minor, including Claude Bowers, James Truslow Adams, and John W. Burgess—the last of whom, by his prestige as a faculty member at Columbia University, gave scholarly sanction to prejudice. He wrote as follows:

“The claim that there is nothing in the color of the skin from the point of view of political ethics is a great sophism. A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason, has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind. To put such a race of men in possession of a ‘state’ government in a system of federal government is to trust them with the development of political and legal civilization upon the most important subjects of human life.... There is something natural in the subordination of an inferior race to a superior race, even to the point of the enslavement of the inferior race.... It is the white man’s mission, his duty and his right, to hold the reins of political power in his own hands for the civilization of the world and the welfare of mankind.”^[13]

Ignorance and willful distortion of the facts of American life and history in regard to the Negro’s role have set the Negro scholar what up to now has been a thankless task. In pure self-defense he has had to try to set the record straight. The first Negro professional writer in America, William Wells Brown, was primarily a historian. Negro scholars have written thousands of dissertations, theses, monographs, articles, essays and books in a gigantic effort to correct the multiple injuries done the race by white writers. Five great collections—at Howard, Hampton, Fisk, Yale, and the Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library—house thousands of volumes and hundreds of magazine and newspaper files, but few except Negroes bother to disturb their dust. Whites show little interest in this Negroana. They seem to feel that they do not need to know about the Negro; they seem to feel that the basic truths about him were established long ago. Even the primary source material on him whom white America calls the greatest Negro American, him whom they have enshrined in the Hall of Fame and about whom they have written ten million words—even the primary source material on Booker Washington—some twenty thousand letters and other papers—remain scarcely touched and certainly unexplored in the Library of Congress, though the Harvard University Press published an erudite and “definitive biography” of the man in 1949.

Negro writers remain generally unrepresented in anthologies of American literature, though in the light of the cultural history of America, the slave biographies (and there are some “literary” ones among them) are at least as important as anything Seba Smith, Charles Augustus Davis, John P. Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms ever wrote. Paul Lawrence Dunbar was a better poet, and, in the opinion of William Dean Howells, a more popular poet and, by the very standard of indigenousness which some anthologists claim to follow, a more important poet than James Whitcomb Riley. James Weldon Johnson and Claude McKay enjoyed international reputations as writers, but they are absent from the best-known American anthologies. Richard Wright has been translated into a dozen languages, including the Chinese, and is rated by Europeans with Steinbeck, Hemingway and Faulkner, but American anthologies neglect him. Gwendolyn Brooks has won the Pulitzer prize for poetry, which is more than Jesse Stuart and William Carlos Williams have done, but her work is not in the collections of American writing.

Nor is the most representative work by whites who have written about Negroes with some regard for justice and truth. Editors use Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” “The Bear” and chapters from Sartoris and Told by an Idiot, but not “Evening Sun Go Down,” or excerpts from Light in August and Intruder in the Dust. Chapters from Huckleberry Finn are used, but not those which show Nigger Jim to be much like other human beings, nor those which excoriate the institution of slavery and express Huck’s hatred of it. George W. Cable is generally represented by selections from Old Creole Days and innocuous passages from The Grandissimes, but never by Madame Delphine (certainly one of his best books), The Silent South or The Negro Question.

The result of this arrogant neglect has been to render American cultural history less effective as an instrument of diagnosis and evaluation. What we have as history reflects little credit upon American historians as scholars. Their work makes pleasant reading and inflates the national ego, but it does not tell those sometimes hard and shameful truths that might now be helpful for the world to know. What Lillian Smith calls “the old conspiracy of silence” needs to be broken, and the “maze of fantasy and falsehood that [has] little resemblance to the actual world” needs to be dissolved. The psychopathic resistance to self-knowledge that the American mind has developed must be broken down. What we have got to know are the things that actually happened—and are still happening—in America. With these things clear before us, perhaps we can use our knowledge and experience for the guidance of mankind.