But the years of my twenties were enkindling and tumultuous. The world was well into that series of social revolutions which started, we are told, with the First World War and is not yet ended, and the American Negro people were a kind of revolutionary catalytic agent in their own country. It was their historic role, to be sure, but it had been suspended while Negroes played a supernumerary part in the European conflict. Americans in general seemed not to realize what had happened in Europe. They did not think of it as change. It was merely an eruption which they had helped put down and were intent on sealing off with the cement of isolationism. But after the war American Negroes reenlivened the spirit of revolt, and the country was alarmed by the truculent persistence with which they fought for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, for instance, and by the vigor of their opposition to the confirmation of Judge John Parker to the United States Supreme Court, and by the inroads of Communism among them, and by their implacable solidarity in the Scottsboro case.

How emotional the times were! What comings-together, what incitement! Out of college just three years at the time of the Scottsboro case in 1931, I remember the almost weekly meetings. Especially do I remember one at which Alice Dunbar Nelson spoke. The widow of Paul Dunbar, a Negro poet nationally famous at the turn of the century, Mrs. Nelson had been one of my teachers in high school and an old family friend. She was beautiful—tall, with ivory skin and a head of glinting red-gold hair—and she was also of great and irresistible charm. One thought of her as being saturated in a serene culture, even in divinity. I doubt that she had ever been much concerned with the common run of Negroes, and that night as she spoke to a large audience of all classes of a united people, she was like a goddess come to earth—but a goddess. In the end, with tears glistening in her eyes, she stretched out her gloved hands and cried, “Thank God for the Scottsboro case! It has brought us together.”

It was a thing to arouse even one constitutionally insensible to mass excitement, and I was not insensible—not in those days. I had found that out the year before, my second in the deep South. A student of mine was murdered, apparently in cold blood, by a white man or men. It happened in the late afternoon, in a section of Atlanta some distance from the college, and I knew nothing of it for several hours. But that night a colleague of about my own age rushed into my dormitory room without the usual courtesy of knocking.

“Come on,” he said, gesturing vehemently, “we got to go.”

I resented his bursting in on me. We did not particularly care for each other anyway. “You might have knocked,” I said.

“For Christ’s sake, this is no time for the amenities!” he said. “We got to go.”

“Go where? I’m not going anywhere.”

“To the meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“My God, man, don’t you know that Dennis Hubert’s been lynched?” His eyes blazed like fires in a draft. He was greatly agitated.

“What!” It must have been a yawp of horror and disbelief. The boy had sat in my class not five hours before.

“Lynched by some goddamned drunken crackers. The Negroes out in East Atlanta are getting together, and we’re going to get together too. We’re not going to take this lying down. Those crackers might come out here any time.”

I could not follow his thinking, even after he reminded me that a relative—either an uncle or a cousin—of the murdered boy was on the college faculty; but the dangerous possibilities of “those crackers” coming bloomed in my imagination like poisonous flowers.

“And if they come, then what?” I said.

“That’s what we’re having the meeting for. Come on.”

And I went. We were only a few, mostly younger instructors, and we tried to appear disciplined and resolute, but hysteria was abroad, and I was caught up in it long enough to pledge to buy a gun through the underground means we had to employ; and long enough to be thrilled by the possession of it when it was delivered in great secrecy the next day; and even long enough to wish to use it on any skulking white man that offered.

The college environs and, I suppose, all the Negro sections of the city, were like alerted camps. There were many false alarms: cars loaded with white men were prowling the neighborhood; another student had been murdered; some white youths had caught a Negro girl coming from work, stripped her of her clothes and chased her naked through the downtown streets. And to match these were the heroics, like guarding the house of the college president and of the Hubert relative who was on the faculty. Every few days for a month Negroes held meetings, but after a time I did not go to them any more. They came to seem like public displays of very private emotions, in the same unbecoming taste of those obscene religious services in which worshipers handle snakes.

One day I took my gun and the box of bullets that came with it and rode out into the country and fired at a dead tree. Wrapped in greased, gray flannel in a cardboard box, the gun is still somewhere among my possessions, but I have not seen it since.