Names have been given to the advocates and promoters of various racial policies. There are gradualists (and they are black and white), who feel that somehow by a process of mechanical progression everything will work out, though to what concrete ends they do not say. The race chauvinists advocate a self-sustaining Negro economic, social and cultural island, and seem to have no fear of a destructive typhoon roaring in from the surrounding sea of the white world. The educationists believe that intellectual competence as indicated by the number of Negro Phi Beta Kappas, doctors of philosophy and various experts will win for the race the respect it does not now receive. There are the individualists who urge that each man work out for himself the compromises that will bring the self-fulfillment he seeks. Finally there are the radicals (there are no degrees of radicalism among them) who, because they seem to see destruction as an end and would first uproot everything, are actually nihilists.

Various racial and biracial institutions look on themselves as representing and implementing one or the other of these policies. The Southern Regional Council, for instance, is gradualist. The Negro press is chauvinist. Most Negro Greek-letter organizations (of which there are seven national and many dozen sectional and local) are educationist. Howard University—though not its president—and the best-known private Negro colleges are individualistic in their approach. Until its demise, the National Negro Congress was radical.

But none of these is seamless, pure and undefiled. Into each of them have seeped influences from one or more of the others. In so far as the Southern Regional Council believes in segregation (and that is very far indeed), it is chauvinistic, and in as much as it sets a premium on intellectual growth as measured by scholarly achievement, it is also educationistic. By the very circumstances of their founding, private Negro colleges lean toward chauvinism, and they encourage this tendency further by courses in “Negro” history, art, literature, business and life. Recently, moreover, some Negro colleges have spoken in favor of the South’s segregated regional education plan—the private ones for reasons not quite clear; the public ones because only segregation will save them from extinction. The radicals who, anyway, take the position that radicalism is the highest, brightest star in the ideological heavens, are very proud of the intellectual caliber of Paul Robeson, Ben Davis, and that other Davis, John, erstwhile president of the National Negro Congress. The Negro press, of course, reflects these conflicts and inconsistencies.

But something more fundamental than the contradictions accounts for the failures of these policies. Gradualism, a habit of thought that marks interracial activities in the South, is geared to the historic-compulsion idea mentioned earlier. It is mostly faith without works, thunder without God, and lengthy, frequently fraudulent reports of “victories” as represented in the decline of lynching and the “long step forward” (nearly a generation in the taking) from the Holcutt case (1932) to the Sweatt case (1950).^[4] As a principle, gradualism is very flattering to the Negro people. It ascribes to them superhuman patience, fortitude and humility in the face of very great social evils. Gradualism is laissez faire—a proscription of planning and foresight in the dynamics of society.

Chauvinism is as impractical for the Negro in America as it is fundamentally dangerous for any people anywhere. Even if Negroes could duplicate the social and economic machinery—and I doubt that they could—the material resources on which their racial island must then depend would have to come from somewhere outside. In a constantly shrinking world, complete independence and isolation are impossible. And even if they were not impossible for the Negro in America, would not the achieving of them result in permanent relegation to secondary status? The very numbers involved—that is, the population ratio—would assure it. I cannot imagine the white majority saying, “Sure, come on and set up your self-sustaining household in a corner of my house.”

There is still a great deal of race chauvinism, and the fact should surprise no one. Negro organs of expression, including scholarly journals, document it: Phylon: [A] Review of Race & Culture, published by Atlanta University; the Journal of Negro Education, published by Howard University; the Journal of Negro Higher Education, published by Johnson C. Smith University; the Journal of Negro History, published by the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History; and a spate of lesser publications. A purely emotional conviction informs chauvinism. It is partly the frustrated pride that is expressed in “Negro History Week” observances, which dichotomize United States history, and in courses in “Negro” literature and art, which turn out to be valiant but thin trickles forcibly and ingenuously diverted from the main stream of American life. Chauvinism springs from a natural desire to find remission from the unequal struggle between black and white, and surcease of discrimination.

The philosophy of the educationist is only superficially different from that of the individualist. The concepts in which they are hallowed seem only to obscure the fact that no man is completely the master of his fate. Only the immature fail to recognize that individual wishes now have almost no authority in the world. Educationists and individualists acknowledge the existence of co-operative evils but deny the necessity to act co-operatively against them. This is also, it seems to me, a denial of brotherhood—a principle which must be made to operate in increasingly wider and wider arcs of human endeavor. Any statement of the individualist’s ideals would sound like a throwback to the time before theories of social compact, or better, social contract, evolved.

The contradictions and conflicts in all this go deeper, much deeper than any short and general analysis can indicate. They plunge their iron tentacles into the minds of individual Negroes, raggedly fragmenting them, scoring them into oversensitized compartments. It is this that we must understand when we think, for instance, of Paul Robeson; and when we hear a Negro college president declare himself opposed to segregation, while at the same time he urges the state to add graduate courses to his already substandard curriculum, so that Negro aspirants to graduate degrees will not embarrass the state’s white university; and when we read on page one of a Negro paper a vilification of white women who “run after” Negro men and on the next page an encomium of a successful mixed marriage. This is more than simply resiliency and accommodation, and there is more than just Negro heart and mind involved. For the Negro is not the problem in toto, nor a problem in vacuo. His behavior, the patterns of his multiple personality, the ebb and flow of action and counteraction and the agonizing ruptures in his group life result from the ill-usage to which he is subject at the hands of American white people.