Looking back now, I know that the essence of these conflicts was distilled in my own boyhood home. My mother, who certainly would not have phrased it so, or even consciously thought it so, was an individualist. She was also the perfect embodiment of a type of Negro womanhood whose existence is still denied by those who cling to the old abasing habits of thought. Virtuous, educated and noted for her beauty, she lived her short life in a firm belief that the moral exercise of individual initiative, imagination and will was enough to overcome the handicap of a colored skin. I have before me now some lines she wrote, obviously thinking of her sons.

These are not a full expression of her thought, for there was enough of the chauvinist and enough of the sense of reality in her to make it clear that in her time, except in the most unusual circumstances, the limits of progress for the Negro were within the Negro world. Yet she spoke with pensive pride of Howard Drew, who had been a great college athlete and who was then a Hartford lawyer with an entirely white clientele; and of Maria Baldwin, the Negro principal of the very estimable Agassiz School in Cambridge, where many Harvard professors sent their children; and of Lillian Evans (Madame Evanti), who sang opera for a season at La Scala; and even (though with less pride, for the theater was still suspect in her mind) of Bert Williams.

But my father was different. He took pride in such successes too, but it irritated him that the knowledge of them was not more widespread. He would have used them on the one hand as arguments against the white-superiority theories of Lothrop Stoddard, Madison Grant and Jerome Dowd, and on the other, as arguments for his own theory that the Negro could and should develop his own American culture. I saw him brought to the verge of tears when the Brown and Stevens Bank—“the richest and safest Negro bank in the world”—failed back in the early 1920’s. And this was not because he lost money in that disastrous collapse—he didn’t—but because that failure cast dark shadows over the prospects of a self-sustaining Negro culture. He saw other shadows many times, but he remained (and now in his eighty-second year remains still in his heart, I think) a race chauvinist. For him there was no incongruity between this and his insistence that his sons go East to a New England college.

Through all the years of my boyhood, my father was secretary of the Wilmington, Delaware, branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; secretary-treasurer of the Sara Ann White Home (now the Layton Home) for Aged Colored People; and a member of the board of the local Negro Y.M.C.A., which he helped found. Besides, he had certain pet, private projects, like needling the truant officer for not making colored children go to school, and upbraiding the police for permitting (interracial) vice to flourish in some Negro neighborhoods, and scolding fallen Negro women and derelict Negro men wherever he found them. He was buoyant and earnest and uplifted in the prosecution of these activities. What characters were drawn to our house! How desperate they were (I know now) in their search for simplification and for that dignity of being that derives only from a sense of belonging!

For these—simplicity and dignity—after all are the true things for which men strive. Unable to attain them in the large sense, men slice life up into manipulatable segments, institute policies of control, reduce to some petty enslaving program and to slogans the great purposes of life—“America for Americans,” “For the Advancement of Colored People,” “The True Church”—and march uneasily toward their graves under the illusion that the particular distortion into which they have been drawn is the straight and narrow path to salvation.

My father was like that. I think that all the Negroes I knew in my childhood were like that. It was not altogether their fault. It need not be pointed out that they had almost no say in determining the basic conditions under which they lived, and that it was this common suffering that drew them together in the first place. But subject to the common suffering was no mass man, but classes and individuals, and what they endured together they examined separately in the powerful lights of personal and class interests and ambitions. And under these lights the caste principle, which white society insisted on and to which the Negroes were responding in the first place—under these lights, the caste principle broke down. Negroness was not itself enough. The phrase, “We’re all Negroes together,” so often heard as a battle cry, had only a sporadic potency. Within the Negro group there were bitter conflicts and grave contradictions.

I remember when the tidal wave of Garveyism^[5] swept over the walls my father had been hastily building against it. He had not had much warning. As secretary of the Wilmington, Delaware, N.A.A.C.P., he read—nay, studied—the Crisis, the Association’s national organ. He knew the official line was that Marcus Garvey was a mountebank and his outfit swindlers preying on the poverty and ignorance of the lower classes. “Do not,” the Crisis said, “invest in the conquest of Africa. Do not take desperate chances in flighty dreams.” My father knew also, with increasing disquiet, how fast the Garvey following was growing. But somehow he felt that only people of the slums could be attracted to it, and he did not think of Wilmington as having a real slum. Of course he was naÏf in this, for a stone’s throw east of our house began a noisome squalor of existence that spread like thick slime to the river. When a sturdy, hard-working citizen (respected because he was hard-working and kept his children in school and did not let his insurance lapse) came bringing my father an official invitation to join the Garveyite “line of march,” my father issued an urgent call to the members of the N.A.A.C.P. for a meeting.

But it was too late, for suddenly the Garveyites were upon us. They came with much shouting and blare of bugles and a forest of flags—a black star centered in a red field. They made speeches in the vacant lot where carnivals used to spread their tents. They had a huge, colorful parade, and young women, tensely sober of mien and plain even in their uniforms, distributed millions of streamers bearing the slogan “Back to Africa.” My father and I stood on the cross street below our house and watched the parade swagger by. Among the marchers my father spotted more than one “Advancer” (his term), even their wives and children. They were not people of the slums. They were men with small struggling clothes-pressing shops and restaurants, personal servants, and what Thomas J. Woofter, Jr., calls “black yeomen,” unlearned but percipient. They had been dependable attendants at meetings promising Negro uplift, and loyal though perhaps somewhat awed members of the N.A.A.C.P. Some of them my father had personally recruited, and low groans of dismay escaped him when he saw them in the line of march. I was a boy, but I remember. And not so much because of the parade as for what happened after.

For the coming of the Garveyites shattered the defensive bulwark around the protective community of Negroes. The whites did not understand this at first, nor ever fully. Accustomed as they were to thinking of the Negro as an undifferentiated caste, they could not be expected to. Where there had seemed to be solidarity, there were factions. Where there had been one leadership, now there were more. Where it had been common to associate the force in the local Negro world with individuals, now the mass seemed to rear up faceless; and where no spontaneous drive had seemed to exist, now there was a hum of self-generating energy. The whites did not understand, but some of them found and took an advantage.

In our district which, with only a scattered thirty per cent of the population white, was fast becoming a ghetto, Negroes had enjoyed political control. They had had no trouble electing one of their own to the school board and another to the city council. The same men had been returned to office time and again. What they did there (and they did little) seemed not nearly so important as just being there. They had enormous prestige and influence among Negroes, and they had not had to fight to keep it.

But in the fall elections of that year they did. Directed by agents from New York, the local Garveyites put up their own candidates, chosen on class lines: the encumbents who, in the common phrase, were “dickties,” found their following split. The campaign smelled of pitch and brimstone and led to street brawls between the sadly outnumbered teen-aged children of the encumbent faction and the Garveyites. Still the whites understood only enough of what was happening to give it burlesque treatment in the press. But the agents from New York were professionals, and their professionalism soon showed itself. They made a deal with the white leaders in the ward. Before the Negroes knew anything, the whites had picked their own candidates, and while Negroes fought one another, whites won the offices.

This was a blow—but that is to put it mildly. In our town, as elsewhere in border state and northerly towns, the pattern of a strong, single Negro leadership was fixed (and so, I suspect, was the pattern of a strong, single Polish and Italian and Jewish leadership), and now the white people were in a quandary. The pattern had been broken; they themselves had knocked down the stanchion that gave stability to race relations. A bond issue was coming up, and Negro backing was indispensable to its success. Hitherto the white people had influenced the direction of Negro thought through local Negro leaders. But who were the leaders now? The white people needed them; they felt uncomfortable and even frightened without them; they needed to know and to control, if possible, what the Negroes were thinking. The race riots in Northern cities—Washington, Chester, Chicago—were still green in memory, and Wilmington itself had almost plunged into that civic horror. Congress just then was drumming up a Bolshevist scare, and Congressman James Byrnes, of South Carolina, had called for indictments for sedition against certain national Negro spokesmen.^[6]

But the Negroes were equally lost and frightened by the immutable evidence of their own factionalism—and frightened the more that white people knew of it. So long as they could seem to maintain a solid front, no matter what internal tensions actually rived them, they felt reasonably safe. But “Now the white people can cut us up,” my father said. “We are divided.” It never occurred to him that the last thing in the world the white people wanted was a divided Negro population. Enforced segregation and the caste system were proof that they did not. My father, who had spent more than two thirds of his life above the Mason-Dixon line, hated segregation, but he had developed the ghetto-mind which made it bearable and safe.

A war of impulses was (and is, I fear) going on all the time in both whites and Negroes. It is the symptom of an American psychological malady. It is also an indictment of our culture and an offense against democracy. Many understand this now, but most do not. Indeed, most have built sophistic bulwarks against understanding. They do not know this, for the many small, subtle fallacies which they abide through force of habit lessen their sense of moral conflict when they are faced with the great contradiction. My father’s saying, “Don’t ever trust a white man,” is in intent no different from the white man’s saying, “All niggers look alike to me.” The phrases represent the lowest common denominator in the American race-experience. They are the essence of empiricism. They voice experiences so debased and so bereft of humaneness as utterly to discredit our way of life in the eyes of the world. They deny the inspiring first principle of democracy—that the person counts as person, no matter what his color or creed.

“Son,” my father said, the night before I went East to college, “remember you’re a Negro. You’ll have to do twice as much twice better than your classmates. Before you act, think how what you do may reflect on other Negroes. Those white people will be judging the race by you. Don’t let the race down, son.”

I have no memory of protesting this terrible burden laid on my mind and heart. Indeed, I am sure I did not. What my father said checked with what I had been taught to feel. My father went on.

“Out East you may feel it less because there’re fewer Negroes, or for the same reason, you may feel it more. Some say one thing, some the other. But no matter where you go in this country, you’ll never get away from being made to know that you are a Negro.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“We’re aliens in an alien land.” (And yet he had fought the Garveyites’ dream of going “back to Africa”; had applauded the deportation of Emma Goldman; on every day of national memorial had hung out the flag, and when the breezes of May, the suns of July and the snows of February rent and seared it, had bought another!) “But there’s some purpose in it,” he went on wearily. “‘God works in mysterious ways....’ There’s certainly some purpose. So do your best. Remember you’re a Negro.”

“I’ll remember,” I said, knowing that I would, because I had been well and exactly taught and because such lessons thrust deep. But feeling even then, I like to think, the iron unfairness of it; perhaps even drawing a sorry comfort from it, like many a Negro boy before and since. For after all, it is a ready-made excuse. More, it is license for us all to live in that blind, egoistic immaturity which, even under the most wholesome learning, we are reluctant to forego anyway. “Twice as much twice better....”

“A Negro’s just as good as anybody else,” my father said, “but he’s always got to prove it.”

Thus burdened, I went off to college.