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Front Matter
Title Page and Credits
READING WITH A PURPOSE NO. 68

THE NEGRO IN AMERICA

BY ALAIN LOCKE

CHICAGO

AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION

1933

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COPYRIGHT, 1933, BY THE AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION 520 N. MICHIGAN AVE., CHICAGO

PUBLISHED JUNE, 1933

Cuts by courtesy A. & C. Boni

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

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WHY THIS COURSE IS PUBLISHED

THERE is a growing interest in the American Negro as an individual, as a citizen, as a contributor to American life, and a growing desire to understand his own point of view upon the problem which is himself. For people who wish to have a better understanding of this problem, black and white, north and south, this course has been prepared. Dr. Locke has introduced six books for reading, five of them by Negroes, and in his Study Outline for the more serious student, two additional books have been included. All these books should be available in any general library or may be obtained through any good bookstore.

If you wish to continue your reading in this field, the librarian of your Public Library will be glad to make suggestions. For planned reading on other subjects you are referred to the other courses in the Reading with a Purpose series (listed elsewhere in this pamphlet) and to your Public Library.

The American Library Association

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THE AUTHOR

IT WAS a difficult problem -- the selection of an author to present the Negro through a reading course. Should he be a conservative or should he represent that advance guard of writers and scholars which sees the Negro in the light of the new social and economic problems he presents? Should he be a Negro or a white man? Among the many possible authors was Dr. Alain Locke, Rhodes scholar at Oxford, 1907-10, student at the University of Berlin, 1910-11, holder of a Ph.D. from Harvard, who has been for some years Professor of Philosophy at Howard University, Washington, D. C. Dr. Locke, as was to be expected, has chosen to present the "new Negro," and the opinions set forth in the following pages, while they excellently represent the modern group to which the author belongs, may fail to find full acceptance among many more conservative readers of both races. If the booklet arouses thought, provokes argument, so much the better; it will then have achieved its real purpose, which is not to convince persons of the soundness of Dr. Locke's opinions but to stimulate them to go further in their reading, weigh and balance, and reach their own conclusions.

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In this third generation of freed men the "new Negro" is at last permitted to see a definite place accorded him in the world of affairs. He, too, is finding his place in the sun, but his contributions through his changed status have needed interpretation. Dr. Locke has long been a keen spokesman for and critic of the promotion of the cultural and artistic gifts of his race. In his own words, "It requires great spiritual elevation to get free of the blinding partisanships that befog both sides of the color line; just as it takes almost the long-range perspective of eternity to see and understand the puzzling paradoxes of America's so-called race problem."

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The Negro in America
Introduction
ONE-TENTH of the population of "these United States" is black, brown or yellow, of Negro descent and remotely of African derivation, 1 and, according to the relative rates of population growth, this racial ratio promises to remain nearly constant indefinitely. To visualize this ratio, it has been aptly suggested that we think of the Negro as "America's tenth man." But the Negro's true significance only becomes evident when to this numerical importance we add that which he has always had as a national issue and which he still has as a present-day minority problem. As the "bone of contention" in the slavery controversy, the "ward of democracy" throughout the Reconstruction, and the "problem" of interracial adjustment in the contemporary social order, the Negro has been by some irony of fate throughout American history the human crux of our practical problems of political and social democracy.

The importance of being a problem, however, is a handicapping, not a stimulating, importance, and the black minority would gladly be relieved of

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it. Yet not until social justice and consistent democracy are worked out in America will the Negro as America's most chronic social problem cease to have an unnatural and disproportionate prominence. This summary and outline reading course are designed to help the reader interested in the problem of the Negro minority achieve historical perspective, social insight and progressive understanding with respect to it, and, equally important, to lead him to some acquaintance with the human elements and achievements of the people behind the problem.

If ever the story of the American Negro can be divorced from the controversial plane of the race problem -- and some day it will -- the story will then be told and appreciated as one of the impressive epics of human history. For, in the final analysis, it is a great folk-epic. In order that the reader may have panoramic perspective, let us review the main stages of this racial epic in its tragic, but momentous and inspiring three-hundred-year course through the decades of American history. We review it not solely to gratify historical curiosity or to evoke sentimental interest, but because the one safe intellectual approach to a social problem is through a sound historical perspective. Since this, too, is a most effective cure for prejudice and social misunderstanding, the

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wide-scale cultivation of such an approach seems obviously one of the outstanding practical hopes of the Negro and one of the great progressive needs of democracy.

To comprehend the Negro in America one must trace his path for seven or eight human generations through a long inferno of slavery and a yet unfinished social purgatory of testing struggle and development. The black man's Odyssey began with the terrific toll of a wholesale transplanting from Africa, rapidly succeeded by burdensome, yet transforming, tasks. The Negro endured titanic toil, the complete transformation of his ways of life, and the stress of an unplanned, begrudged, but quite redeeming, assimilation of the white man's civilization and religion. Patience, adaptability, loyalty and smiling humility gave him the subtle victory of survival against great odds; and the first act of slavery climaxed with the welding of patriarchal ties between master and slave.

But the tragic second act was already pushing the first off the historical scene. Slavery deepens and spreads; the black victim must descend to its abysses in the Lower South, nurturing almost hopelessly, but for religion, the underground hope of freedom. And then, as the vexing question of human property begins to divide the political and legal councils of the nation, the fugitive slave sets

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fire to the tinder of abolitionism and moral reaction, and suddenly out of the first great crisis comes the Civil War and slave emancipation.

But after the first blind leap of the black masses into the hopeful chaos and opportunities of freedom, Negro life was destined to drag through the Reconstruction and its heavy series of ordeals. First there was the difficult lesson of self-maintenance, clumsily but ploddingly learned; then the still heavier task of education, feverishly and unevenly achieved; then confusion and setback, patiently endured, under the storm of Reconstruction reaction and mob violence; then a slow, dogged retreat from serfdom and partial defeat on the tenant farms to the labor marts of the towns and cities; more patient endurance of the loss of the newly won franchise and the civil rights of full citizenship; and eventually a new mass concentration and survival in the city's black ghettos, under steady odds of economic discrimination and segregation.

Finally, with another war, another crisis and its new opportunities came. This time it was the surge forward into the World War's rapid expansion of life and labor, and a consequent enlargement of life, economic and cultural, in the new centers. But the anticipated rewards of the Negro's patriotic response to the idealism of

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the "War to Save Democracy" were not measurably realized and, spurred by the bitter disillusionments of post-war indifference, there came that desperate intensification of the Negro's race consciousness and attempt at the recovery of group morale through a racialist program of self-help and self-determination which has been the outstanding development in Negro life during this generation. With this phase came the beginnings of independent economic enterprise, a growing disposition for political action and the recovery of civil rights and political participation; and finally on the horizon a mounting wave of new social and economic realism. It is with this new temper and attitude that the Negro confronts the present crisis, with its crossroads dilemma of either slow progress by patient advance and interracial cooperation or of problematic but tempting quick progress through joining issues with the forces of radical proletarian reform. This is the point at which we contemporary spectators stand, survey and wonder. Certainly the past of the Negro in America has been an epical adventure, pursued against great odds and opposition, but favored, almost providentially at critical times, by saving alliances with the forces of moral and social liberalism, all combining to achieve a gradually ascending scale of achievement and progress.

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On the other side, the story is equally dramatic if read in forward-looking perspective. It is the long Odyssey of the white mind, wandering through the mazes of self-made dilemmas, in search of a way out into the consistent practice of democracy.

Out of the Civil War, inevitable consequence of the deepening hold of slavery, emancipation came as a strategic blow at the seceded South; half a national economy had to be overtuned and the freed Negro masses became the helpless, burdensome wards of the Federal government. Meshed in with the aftermath of war and slavery came then a conflicting flow and ebb of forces, now favorable, now unfavorable, to the interests of the Negro.

In 1895, however, a leader in black reconstruction caught the approval of the South and the favor of Northern captains of industry by an appeal for advancing the South through improving the industrial and economic condition of the Negro. There followed a great revival of philanthropic interest and aid in the education of the Negro; but along with it a very prevalent and possibly dangerous acceptance of Booker Washington's strategic compromise of bi-racialism: -- "In all things vital and economic, we can be one as the hand, while in things social we can be separate

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as the fingers." There followed a decade and more of common, constructive, enthusiastic effort to truss up the sagging economy of the rural Southern Negro, but the odds of a bad system of land tenant farming, an unscientific type of agriculture, continued exploitation and the inroads of the growing industrialization of the South all combined to cause a steady trek of the Negro population from the land toward the cities. This caused or coincided with another reaction of Southern opinion and a flare of race riots and increased racial tension, bridged only at a desperate moment in 1919 by the adoption of the new machinery of local interracial commissions to allay popular antagonism and bring the better elements of both races together in common counsel and constructive community effort.

To this movement we owe the emergence of the new liberal South. But the large-scale migration of Negroes from the South to Northern centers shortly afterward led to increased friction in these communities, and merely shifted the areas and issues of racial tension. In fact, a problem conventionally regarded as sectional suddenly and unmistakably became national, and a new phase of the race problem began. We still confront a seriously divided white mind, no longer split sectionally, but divided now into nation-wide liberal and

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reactionary camps. A liberal element in the South, small but influential, has recanted the traditional antagonisms and code of the old régime, and in liberal circles, North and South, an enlightened minority is showing an increased willingness to welcome Negro advance, to join cooperatively with Negro leadership in programs of racial and community improvement, and to extend recognition and reciprocity to the advance-guard elements of Negro life. Over against this, however, is a white mass mind still reactionary and strongly racial; this time largely over labor rivalry and for economic reasons. In fact, segregation policies and labor discrimination have now become the crucial practical issues in the contemporary racial situation. And although this reactionary body of opinion is not as militant as the older traditional opposition, its wide distribution, North and South, is a threatening aspect in the present and near future.

These are but high lights in the history of the shifting attitudes of the white majority mind, as it has grappled and fumbled, relaxed and grown tense again, in reaction to the steadily changing situations of the steadily advancing black minority.

Students of the question are generally agreed that the effect of the Negro's presence in this country has been about as marked as the admittedly

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great and transforming influence of America upon the Negro. There is this double strand running through the whole scheme of the American race problem, and the student should bear constantly in mind the parallelism by which every white move has its black counterpart, every black stitch, its white counter-stitch. Whenever we think of the situation as a minority problem, we must instantly think of it also in its other aspect as a majority problem. This is factual warrant for preferring to regard the dilemmas and difficulties of this minority-majority interaction as the American race problem rather than as the "Negro problem." In every historical crisis its consequences have turned out to be just as national as they have been racial; and it should be obvious that from no one side of the equation alone can its progressive solution be carried forward.

We now invite the reader, after this panoramic introduction, to more detailed and critical survey of the problem in its three main periods of historical development: the period of Slavery; the period of Reconstruction, and the period of our own time. Two alternative plans of reading are suggested; each to be prefaced for background and perspective by selected chapters of key reading. After this introductory material, the books recommended may either be read in the order

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listed or the more systematic study course (See Study Outline, p. 61.) may be followed. The latter is recommended for formal study groups who may wish to combine discussion with their reading, or for individuals desiring a closer scrutiny of the details of the subject.

The Problem of Slavery
Key Reading: "The Seven Labors of the New World," in The Negro in American civilization, by Charles S. Johnson. p. 3-15. "The New Race," in Brown America, by Edwin R. Embree. Chap. 1, p. 3-24.

To understand the historical roots of the race question, we must look briefly but deeply at the institution of slavery in its relation to the fundamental institutions of America. When the American colonists, in their hard task of conquering the new continent, reached out desperate hands to the African slave trade for conscripted slave labor, they took hold of the most fateful strand in American history. Simultaneously with the founding of a country destined to become a great political democracy, they imported democracy's greatest antithesis, and what almost became democracy's

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nemesis. The inclusion of the white indentured servant in the colonial scheme, and the close identity of the earliest Negro importees with this same status, show that the principle of economic caste was basic in some of the colonies and their tradition. This inconsistency of institutions thrust a fundamental dilemma into American society and history. The presence of the Negro simply allowed it to develop into a deeper and more tragic scheme than mere class exploitation. Indeed the Negro took the brunt of the system and enabled it to be diverted from the backs of the poor white settlers. Seen in clear retrospect, the die of slavery was cast not by difference in race, but by undemocratic ideas and practices in the early scheme of American society.

Slavery is clearly seen in its true light, with the human issues dominant and the racial factor almost irrelevant, only as it came into the American scheme and again as it passed out. In the two hundred and fifty years between, as the particular plight of the black man, slavery could mask its inconsistencies behind the black exception, and save the face of professions of principle basically contradicted, however, for many generations. Thomas Jefferson, clear-sighted democrat that he was, said he "trembled for his country" when he considered slavery; and a contemporary philosopher

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agrees when he says: "Slavery proved to be the first great institutional test of the equality doctrine." 2 Driving this fact home, with reference to the Negro, another writer justly says: "One of the significant contributions made by the Negro to American life has been the way in which his presence has helped in the development and extension of the American idea of democracy." 3

The average American mind, however, without historical perspective on the issue of slavery, makes the Negro bear both the brunt and the blame of the situation; as if his very presence in the body politic had constituted the race problem. Booker Washington's shrewd pleasantry that Negroes were the only element of the American population that came here by special and urgent invitation has scarcely sufficed to drive home the sober realization that the Negro was desperately needed, and humbly but importantly effective in the settlement of the New World. His warrant for being here is beyond question, doubly so because his mass service of basic labor was unrequited for seven or eight generations. It is estimated that before 1800 the number of Negroes brought to America was more than twenty times that of all Europeans

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combined. 4 The terrific toll of lives taken can be realized better from the fact that in the first census of 1790 the black population was within decimals of being 20 per cent of the total. "The wealth of the New World," says Embree, "came largely by the sweat of this new race." And in his Gift of black folk, W. E. B. Du Bois rightly rates the contribution of the Negro's labor as his first and greatest gift. No matter how the benefits be computed, it remains a fact that the Negro's half-begrudged share in American civilization was bought and paid for in advance.

We must take another brief glance at the effects of slavery before leaving the subject for other issues in which, as moderns, we have naturally keener, more direct, interest. Slavery planted the Negro deep in the subsoil of American life, and made him culturally a basic American. Mr. Embree's chapters vividly sketch this transformation; he calls it the "making of a new race." Certainly slavery was the rudest but most effective school of "Americanization." The domestic and rural form of American slavery made it peculiarly intimate in its group contacts, and forced the rapid assimilation of the white man's civilization, language, religion and folk-ways. This cultural transfusion was further reenforced by considerable interbreeding

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and admixture of blood, with the accumulative effect of leaving, according to the rough analysis of the census, about twenty per cent of the Negro population mulatto. Scientific investigation of typical Negro groups today estimates much heavier admixture and discovers barely a one-third remnant of pure-blood Negroes. On either basis slavery is revealed as the institution directly responsible for undermining its own chief contentions. Originally there were wide physical and cultural differences between the two races. While breaking down all these natural barriers, slavery erected an artificial and tyrannical substitute in the tradition and doctrine of color-caste.

Thus the very institution which thrust the Negro so deeply and vitally into American civilization was forced in self-justification to deny desperately the trends and results of its own handiwork. Out of these peculiar paradoxes, the characteristic American variety of race prejudice was born, or, rather, manufactured. In the official apologia of slave-holding, a doctrine was needed to offset every real and potential claim of the black minority with a nullifying counter-claim. Over against the country's debt to the Negro for faithful labor and loyal service was set the presumably incalculable indebtedness of the Negro for the benefits of white

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civilization and Christianity. The latter was indeed a solace, but emphasis on the Negro as the moral beneficiary of Christianity was used by the slave-holding class to propagate submissiveness, and eventually to justify slavery itself. Similarly, to mask the facts of racial admixture and insulate its social effects, the contrary-to-fact doctrine of white ethnic integrity was set up and artificially maintained by ignoring the strong, natural claims of the mixed-blood class -- claims which have generally been recognized in every other country where considerable miscegenation has taken place. The reader should note, in passing, this historical reason for the absence of a buffer class in the American racial situation, and the cause, as well, of the unusual psychological solidarity of the whole Negro minority.

Also, over against the Negro's really remarkable assimilation of white civilization, barriers were set up as extreme as laws which forbade teaching the Negro to read and write. The legend of the Negro's "non-assimilability" was popularized, and his thwarted efforts at assimilation written down as "imitativeness" and "inherent mental inferiority." This doctrine attributing the Negro's enforced handicaps and acquired disabilities to "inherent traits" and "inferior native ability" has developed so strong a hold upon the American

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public mind that only in the last decade or so have scientific study and fair judgment been able to make any headway in explaining and correcting it. Worst paradox of all was the spread of the fallacy of the Negro's childlike dependence upon slavery and paternalism, instead of a recognition of the historical reason for such traits and of the historical dependence of the feudal system of slavery upon them and upon him. In short, race prejudice is obviously designed to make the Negro bear the blame as well as the brunt of the system of which he was the social victim.

If these doctrines had died a natural death with that of the system which produced them, there would be only the need for passing mention and not for this extensive analysis. But the psychological aftermath of slavery persists as the philosophy of the "color line," and still offers more resistance to the Negro's progress than all the practical difficulties of social advance or the actual tasks of social, political and economic adjustment. "Keeping the Negro in his place" amounts to prolonging in clandestine form the régime of slavery and leads essentially to the same negative results -- the denial and self-contradiction of democracy in actual social practice, and the keeping of one-tenth or more of the population in a condition of artificially arrested progress.

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The Civil War

Modern historians treat the Civil War as the clash of two competing economies -- the plantation economy and the system of free labor -- and point out that it was fought primarily to preserve the Federal Union rather than to free the slave. That is true. But in addition to being the "bone of contention," slavery was the foundation and mainstay of the Southern plantation economy, and the victory of the industrial free-labor economy would have necessitated its eradication. The development of modern industrial America would have been impossible in close and direct competition with the slave-labor régime. Slavery's elimination by Lincoln's emancipation decree based on military necessity merely anticipated what economic necessity would later have required. But the heroic surgery involved made it inevitable that Negro life and that of the South should sustain terrific shocks.

So, although it settled one phase of a grave moral and political issue, the Civil War was only the beginning of the end of a régime. For the slave, instead of a miraculous passage into a democratic paradise of liberty, equality and fraternity, emancipation was merely a release from the black cave of personal bondage, with physical freedom to enter the painful valley of the Reconstruction.

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Even in becoming a citizen on paper, through civil rights legislation and constitutional guarantees of freedom, citizenship and suffrage, he remained the disadvantaged serf, left to work out his destiny in the land of his oppression. Moreover, only the first crucial step had been taken in the emancipation of the American social mind; and even that was to be subject in the North to the lapse of the moral enthusiasm of the war, and in the South to the sharp reactions of resentment and wounded sectional pride. Such was the historical set-up of the Reconstruction, the period that had to struggle with the direct aftermath of slavery.

The Problem of Reconstruction
Key Reading: The Negro in our history, by Carter G. Woodson. Chaps. 23, 24, and 25, p. 382-445.

"The Freedmen's Bureau," by W. E. B. DuBois, in Calverton's Anthology of American Negro literature. p. 277-98.

As the reader has seen, circumstances forced the Negro to make his experiment as a freeman in the very land of his former captivity. His progress, educational, economic, political and social, involved therefore not only his own painful reconstruction,

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but the slow reconstruction of the South itself and of the white Southern mind. It was a social battle on three fronts: Negro advance had to overcome the dead weight of its own backward condition and to face as well two distinct bodies of prejudice and opposition -- first, the traditional attitudes and policies of the aristocratic Southern slave-holding class, and then the still more dangerous new prejudice and antagonism of the "poor whites," who, themselves indirect victims of the slave régime, resented being brought into political and economic competition with the liberated slaves.

Against this array of negative conditions, the Negro would surely have foundered where he was, except for the paternalistic guidance of the Freedmen's Bureau, the temporary protection of federal troops, a legal barricade of civil rights' legislation, and the temporary power of the ballot under the early Reconstruction state governments. His greatest and most permanent ally, however, was the educational and spiritual guidance of Northern missionaries, who founded schools in almost every important center and, besides training the pioneer Negro leadership, brought the general illiteracy of the freedmen down in two decades from 97 to 57 per cent. 5

Somehow the whole first phase of Reconstruction

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in the South swung forward on the pivot of the education of the Negro, and backward on the pivot of politics. The reader can follow this in detail in the Woodson chapters recommended. On any score of measurement, it is true that "never before in a similar period of history has so large a group of people made the social, intellectual and economic advance that the American Negroes made." The basic foundation of this advance was laid in about one generation during the period under discussion, that is, between 1870 and 1900. In this progress, the Negro had three great aids, coming on the scene like a relay of reenforcements. First was Northern missionary educational guidance and philanthropic help to schools, churches and social uplift projects. This was crucial assistance, especially since between 1865 and 1895 it was the sole constructive influence from without a South that was itself poor, disorganized and reactionary. Then, in 1895, the good will of certain better elements in the South was captured by the tactful leadership of Booker Washington; and with local favor and considerable Northern assistance a fresh advance was made in education, farm ownership, the improvement of rural and city public schools for Negroes, and some advances in community protection and housing. Finally, from 1912 on, these forces were supplemented by the

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organized movement of interracial cooperation, under agencies like the Southern Sociological Congress, the University Commission on Race Relations, the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, effecting a decided improvement in the attitude and activity of the white South in improving race relations and promoting Negro progress.

Black Reconstruction

Booker Washington became the symbol and spokesman of Black Reconstruction because he advised the Negro to work out his salvation in the South, and advocated practical, patient self-help pivoted on the gradual improvement of the condition of the black masses and the gradual wearing down of white indifference and prejudice. In its setting -- the South of Reconstruction -- this program was undoubtedly constructive, sound and effective. But it did make concessions with dangerous possibilities. The Washington program thus became the great divide between the conservative and the liberal schools of thought on the race question. From the first historical difference of opinion between these two schools on the relative importance of mass and industrial education and higher and professional education, a general controversy sprang up involving the relative merits of the half-loaf and the whole-loaf policy on practically

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all the controverted issues of race programs for more than two decades.

Washington's program was at first simply the philosophy of practical common sense applied to the actual conditions of the Reconstruction South, in which he knew the work of race improvement must go forward step by step, beginning where it actually was. But never, up to the time of his death in 1915, was he able completely to disavow the interpretation put upon his program as an acceptance of the principles of opportunism and of the policy of bi-racial segregation. The equal rights reformist wing of Negro thought under the leadership of Dr. DuBois so interpreted it; and later, reactionary and conservatively half-way white opinion seized upon the same interpretation, with approval, for condoning separatism, the double standard or unequal treatment, claiming the endorsement of an outstanding Negro leader. It is doubtful whether Booker Washington ever intended such interpretations. On the side of separatism he was motivated primarily by the thought of developing race solidarity and racial initiative and turning the group energy back in on itself for heightened morale and more effective group action. But such is the danger of making even strategic concessions where fundamental principles are involved. In later developments, as we

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shall see, the issue has been closed, at least as far as Negro leadership is concerned, by an almost unanimous acceptance of the equal rights position, and the wholesale repudiation of programs based on the limited participation or segregation policy.

This issue, however, has more than specific application to the problems of Negro leadership in the late Reconstruction. Just before and immediately after the World War, large-scale migrations of Negroes to Northern and Mid-Western cities seriously extended the areas of racial friction and maladjustment. With this has gone a very general spread of the policies of educational, residential and industrial segregation, to such an extent that the problem of segregation may now be regarded as the crux of the present-day contemporary phase of the race problem. Conservative, reactionary, and anti-Negro opinion, North and South, is behind the policy of "segregating the Negro" and introducing bi-racial organization as far as practicable and possible. It is partly due to this situation that Negro leadership has become practically unanimous in presenting a solid front against segregation.

Dr. Moton, Washington's successor, has this to say about segregation: "No phase of discrimination against the Negro touches the race more widely or more intimately than segregation. In

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its application no measure operates so effectively to retard the general progress of the race, not even disfranchisement. . . . In theory segregation is advocated as a measure applicable with equal force to both races, but in practice this obtains so rarely that it is not an exaggeration to say that for all practical purposes it never does. . . . In practically every case, segregation means unequal facilities, conditions and opportunities." And again, in the same book, he says: "Segregation operates practically to make an ever-widening gulf between the two races which leaves each race more and more ignorant of the other. Without contact there cannot be knowledge; segregation reduces the contacts, and so knowledge and understanding decrease. With decreasing knowledge come increasing distrust and suspicion, and these in turn engender prejudice and even hatred. So a vicious circle is established whose ultimate effect, unless counteracted, must be the separation of the races into more or less opposing camps, with results as disastrous to the spirit of American institutions as to the genuine progress of both races." 6

It should be evident from this shift and contrast between what was a progressive policy at the turn of the century, but now, thirty years later, is stamped as hopelessly reactionary, that some

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fundamental change has occurred either in the Negro or in his status. In fact, Negro life and thought have passed through their most rapid and transforming developments relatively recently. Neither the expediencies nor the concepts of the Reconstruction period are applicable if one would think accurately and realistically of the Negro of the present generation. We pass, then, to the consideration of this revolutionary change.

The Present-Day Problem
Key Reading: What the Negro thinks, by R. R. Moton. Chaps. 3 and 4. p. 29-68.

The new Negro, by Alain Locke. p. 3-16.

The transformation of the Negro during the last two decades is founded on two motives, one physical, the other, spiritual. Migration has been the physical mainspring of the change, and a new spirit of race consciousness and solidarity has been the regenerating spiritual force. Out of the combination has come both a "New Negro," and a new frontage of the Negro on American life.

All through his history since emancipation, the Negro has been responding to unfavorable conditions by migration, but this last series of mass

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movements has been upon an unprecedented scale. It had begun before the outbreak of the World War, but was heavily increased by the demands of industry during the war for the replacement of the European immigrant labor supply. This has been estimated as a movement northward of over a million and a half of the Negro population. But to this must be added that phase of the Negro migration which is not inter-sectional between North and South, but from the rural to the urban centers within comparatively short range. Two results are outstanding, the rapid urbanization of the Negro, a serious shift in the areas feeling the stresses of race contacts and their difficulties, a decided extension of new phases of the race situation to cities of the North and Mid-West, and a closer alignment of the race issue with the problems of labor competition and economic adjustment.

It has already been pointed out that a decided increase in race tension and a rapid spread of policies of segregation have accompanied this mass movement. But the movement has had its positive gains; large masses of the Negro population have been subjected to the galvanizing shocks of change and have thus been stimulated to rapid progress. Because of the new concentrations in city areas, there has been a marked heightening of the sense

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of group solidarity and common interests. This will prove to be the most potential and powerful factor in the whole situation, if ever the exigencies of Negro life should demand large-scale mass action. And if the present heavy social and economic pressure on the Negro should increase or even be maintained, such demands will undoubtedly arise. There have also been great drawbacks in this urban movement, chiefly the unfavorable conditions in the almost ghetto-like city centers where so many of the migrant masses have been forced to congregate, and the precarious marginal position of the Negro on the fringe of the labor market, faced at present, as he is, by comparative indifference or hostility from the ranks of organized white labor.

Though fraught with danger, this is an entirely new alignment, likely within half a generation to change the whole basic aspect of the race question. There is a school of younger Negro thought which, viewing the increasing emphasis of the situation upon the economic condition of the Negro masses, regards the race question as likely to resolve itself into the issues of the economic class struggle and proletarian radicalism. There is a main obstacle, however, for the present, in the conservative temper of social thinking now prevalent among Negroes, although in very recent years

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there are increasing signs of a slow drift toward the spirit and doctrines of social radicalism. Certainly the only likely factors in a possible shift of any large section of the Negro masses in the direction of radical social action would be those of extreme pressure from intolerable mass conditions in the city areas or desperate reaction in the face of continued exclusion from the ranks and opportunities of progressive and organized white labor.

A feature of great importance, however, is the swing of the race situation in the South toward this same condition of increasing economic discrimination and labor antagonism. This is a direct result of the recent industrialization of the South and the simultaneous shift of the Negro population to city and town centers. At first the northward migration of the Negro had a favorable influence on the Southern situation. There was a greater appreciation of the Negro as an economic asset and as a potential labor supply. Considerable improvement followed in the policy of Southern communities, resulting in the improvement of school and civic facilities for Negroes in the South. But in spite of heavy increases in state expenditure for public school facilities for Negroes in the South, still more equitable division of the public school funds is obviously necessary, since with all this rapid improvement only 69 per cent of the

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Negro children of school age are enrolled and the general per capita expenditure averages for the whole South only one-third of the average expenditure for white children, with of course many communities falling considerably below this general average.

When all favorable progress has been taken into account, therefore, there is still much injustice to be remedied: the persistence of lynching and mob-terrorism, the increasing tension and competition of white and Negro unskilled and semi-skilled labor, the crowding of the Negro out of the higher ranks of labor, some of which he occupied earlier in the century, the continuation of the traditional policies of segregation in public, civic and educational activities, the inequitable distribution of the Negro share in public tax funds for schools and civic improvements, and continued lack of respect for the advancing class of Negroes, except from the few enlightened liberal elements in the Southern communities.

Summarizing the whole situation, we may see that although the Negro has made amazingly rapid gains in the last few years, the race situation in both the North and the South is intensified, indeed partly because of these gains. For mass opinion among whites still interprets this rapid advance as social and economic encroachment, and

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seldom looks at it in its deeper constructive aspect of common advance and the lifting of the level of civilization. So, unless liberal white opinion in both sections, in cooperation with intelligent Negro leadership, can rapidly widen opportunities and lessen artificial handicaps, the mass momentum of Negro advance must produce serious race conflict. Short of the bitter extremities of ruthless economic conflict or resolution of the mass feud between black and white through the discovery of common proletarian interests, there lies one intermediate way of realistic hope, since, after all, America has kept herself an institutional democracy in spite of her treatment of the Negro. The Negro, though still heavily disfranchised, is potentially a citizen with the corrective power of the ballot. Two things encourage this hope: the revival of the Negro's interest in reclaiming the ballot along with political independence in its use, and the fact that by his recent migrations to border states, he has acquired unexpectedly considerable re-enfranchisement and latent political power. This, intelligently used, might remove enough of the restrictions to his progress to forestall serious race conflict, and might lead to the steady progressive adjustment so desirable and so desired by all but the extreme social reactionaries and the extreme social radicals.

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The Negro's Americanism

A solution of the race problem within the institutional framework and the traditional ideals of American democracy would be most congenial and welcome to the Negro, for on the whole his Americanism is unquestioned and unquestioning. Both by temperament and group policy, the Negro has been conformist throughout his history in this country. His values, his ideals, his objectives, have been peculiarly and unreservedly American. Racialism has rarely, if ever, been a direct mood for the Negro, but only an enforced counter-attitude in the face of proscription and discrimination. And, even then, this racialism has never set up separate or different values or loyalties, but has only been a practical social device to secure on a separate basis and by another route the common values and ends which prejudice more directly denied or curtailed. Except for superficial physical dissimilarities, by and large, the Negro would be indistinguishably American, and it is unlikely that a foreign observer would believe himself in the presence of a different race. What overtones of emotional difference there are, in fair comparison with the mass similarities, would seem negligible, making the prevalent social sense of difference all the more contrary to reason and ironical. On historical, psychological and cultural

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grounds, the Negro minority is entitled to the fullest share in American civilization, and has less real impediments and separatist tendencies than any other of the many component minority elements in America.

The Negro as Man and Artist
Key Reading: "Soil and Soul," in Brown America, by Edwin R. Embree. p. 233-52. Black Manhattan, by James Weldon Johnson. p. 145-280.

It is unfortunately too easy, especially if one's approach to the Negro is through what is written about him, to forget that behind the problem there stands, after all, a human being. Biography, with its story of human achievement, will help the reader turn toward this human element and see the flesh and blood Negro that controversial literature too often obscures from sight. Here the reader will not only be closest to those basic human values that know no color-line, but will be nearest to the most practical source of social optimism in the dramatic demonstration of the possibilities of Negro achievement in spite of the handicapped start, the closed door, or the unequal chance and limited opportunity, as the case

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may be. For this purpose, the most heroic and dramatic of Negro life stories might have been chosen, such as the biographies of Frederick Douglass, hero and champion of the anti-slavery cause, or of Booker Washington, leader of the Black Reconstruction. But James Weldon Johnson's sprightly and diversified account of Negro achievement, Black Manhattan, has been chosen for two very definite reasons. First because it presents a phalanx of Negro talent and effort so varied, so pioneering, that no reader can fail to gain a much enlarged conception of the Negro's achievement and cultural possibilities. Single biographies can too often be dismissed or discounted as the grand exceptions, but Mr. Johnson's narrative gives such a panorama of past and present achievement that we are forced to see its social significance and the still expanding future. Then, too, the progressive reader will naturally wish to meet to-day's leaders and understand the contemporary trends of Negro advance. Certainly no one can turn away from even the most cursory reading of this book with the smug, complacent feeling that he "knows the Negro" or that the Negro has a fixed circumscribed place in the scheme of life.

It will be revolutionary in most experiences to set these new types of the modern, oncoming Negro over against the Negro that the American

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public already knows. One is typical, but the other is, in the best sense of the word, representative. Provided we know them for what they are, there is little need for tilting broadsides of argument against the comic and sentimental stock Negro characters, still so dear to the public mind and heart. If they ever were representative, they belong to the obsolete past, and but live on in the amusement tradition of the stage, the screen, the sentimental novel, and the stereotyped joke. It is only when they are taken out of their context, and used as patterns of vision and judgment for an easy-going misunderstanding of the Negro of today that they are dangerous and objectionable. Already they have been recanted at their source; and perhaps even they will gradually fade out in spite of their traditional hold. A decade or so ago one could not have imagined a white Southern writer drawing the peasant Negro from careful realistic observation instead of from his own beloved pattern of the plantation tradition. Yet we have books like DuBose Heyward's Porgy and Mamba's daughters, Julia Peterkin's Black April and Scarlet Sister Mary, Guy Johnson's John Henry, Evelyn Scott's The wave -- to name a typical few -- that present a Negro character shattering the hollow sentimentalities of the whole school of plantation romanticists. And now we can

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see that, sincere though they were, these writers of the old school saw even the Old Negro superficially, because they saw him condescendingly and through the self-justifying traditions of the old régime. To the old school, the Negro character was a foil to set off the high lights of the plantation tradition and its proud but defeated cause. To the new school of contemporary Southern writers, for the most part, the Negro is a folk-type to be studied, drawn and interpreted in his own idiom and values.

In this revaluation of Negro life and character which we have just noted, the reader makes his first contact with what is really the outstanding and novel development of the racial situation in the last ten years. It is the rising tide of the cultural recognition of the Negro. It began first in the recognition of the cultural value of the Negro's folk spirit and its hitherto unrecognized folk-gifts. Then followed an appreciative reception of the artistic talents and contribution of the present generation of creative Negro artists, and finally a discovery of the place of the Negro cultural elements in the building of a native American culture. All three phases we must pass in brief review to understand the new significances of the Negro as man and artist.

As the new school of Southern writers and folklorists

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has discovered, the Negro peasant humbly and silently made a great contribution, especially to American folklore, the American dance, and American music. Until lately this influence has not been credited, mainly because these folk-gifts have become an integral part of the spirit and tradition of the Southland, and some of them, like jazz and American folk-song, part of the common spiritual currency of the land. The Negro spiritual, Uncle Remus, a whole strain of distinctive humor, the most typical variety of Southern folk-ballad, the most popular type of Southern song-ballad, and practically all the most characteristic idioms of modern American music and dance forms are traceable to Negro origins. Many of these idioms have been elaborated, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse, but their Negro origin is conceded, and their originality widely recognized. It is particularly significant that a great part of this recognition, and much of the scientific study which is authenticating it, has come and is coming from the enlightened art and research of the new white South. 7

But the full cultural recognition of which we

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speak will never come from just the recognition of the Negro's humble and anonymous folk-gifts, most of them from a generation long since dead. We are now in the third generation from the black forefathers who produced the spirituals and Uncle Remus. There is a present-day and much more formal contribution being made in all the arts by a younger generation that has been on the scene since about the end of the World War. Some of the war's galvanizing shocks may have helped precipitate this movement of racial expression through art; but it was primarily, I think, a psychological ripening from within the group itself. It has variously been called the "Negro Renaissance" and the emergence of the "New Negro." The reader will find both the platform and the first fruits of this cultural movement in the collaborated anthology -- The new Negro, published in 1925. It presents the philosophy that Negro life should find a new spiritual dynamic in artistic self-expression; it was addressed primarily to the internal racial audience to save itself from propaganda and exhibitionism, and it proposed emphasizing folk values and basing itself on the folk-tradition in order to avoid imitative dependence on Caucasian and American models. This was more a statement of contemporary trend and mood than an adoption of a formal platform,

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and the productive Negro talent of this generation has by no means unanimously adopted this creed. However, the composite mind and mood of the present generation of Negro artists is decidedly racial in emphasis of subject-matter and less, but noticeably so, in emphasis of style. And many attribute to the inspiration of the racialist motive much of that unusual creative spurt in all the formal arts, particularly poetry, music and drama, which has earned such reputation for the Negro as an important contemporary American artist and culture producer.

A hasty roll call of this generation is necessary, not only to indicate its scope, but to give the reader clues to the significant names. The work of the writers mentioned can be sampled in the two anthology collections on our list, The new Negro, and the Anthology of American Negro literature, edited by V. F. Calverton. Such a list must include James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown, among the poets; Willis Richardson, Angelina Grimke, Eulalie Spence, John Matheus, playwrights; Rudolph Fisher, Langston Hughes, Burghardt DuBois, Nella Imes, Claude McKay, Weldon Johnson, Eric Walrond, novelists and short-story writers; Archibald Motley, William Johnson, Edward

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Harleston, Lesesne Wells, Hale Woodruff, Laura Wheeler, painters; Richmond Barthe, Sargent Johnson, Meta Warrick, May Howard Jackson, sculptors; Paul Robeson, Roland Hayes, Marion Anderson, Abbie Mitchell, singers; Will Marion Cook, Hall Johnson, William Grant Still, Rosamond Johnson, Henry T. Burleigh, composers -- to mention only better known names. To this list the names of the pioneer Negro historian, Carter Woodson, must certainly be added, and that of the early forerunner, Dr. DuBois, author of Souls of black folk. To most of these artists racial expression is paramount, and the search for racial idiom important, although many of them are far from being narrow racialists in the scope and spirit of their work.

It is this development which will earn and is earning, first from the cultured minority, but later inevitably from the whole body of public opinion, a new estimate of the Negro and his capabilities. For genius and creative talent, exceptional enough numerically among all peoples, are the pivot of progress and the foundation of group prestige. The widespread dis-esteem of the Negro could only have continued so long after the lapse of slavery because of the lack of representatives to match the best in the more seasoned and favored culture of the white man. But it will not be possible

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very much longer to compare the Negro at his worst with his fellow-American at his best, as has been the popular habit; for there will stand out on the highest levels unchallengeable instances where the Negro has attained cultural distinction and demonstrated all the potentialities of which any group has shown itself capable. Thus the new confidence which pervades this young advance-guard of cultural progress, and the new spirit of pride and self-esteem which it is engendering in the race itself. Yesterday Negroes were apologetically suppressing their racial characteristics, physical as well as emotional; today, on the whole, they are following the leadership of these enlightened spokesmen, and are emphasizing them with little or no apology.

A final phase of this movement has important bearing upon the problems and aims of American art and culture in general. It not only involves the question whether there can be a distinctive native American art, but whether America is to accept the "melting-pot" conception of her culture or the "reciprocity" notion. Many other cultural traditions richer and more developed than the Negro's have been transplanted to the American continent. But too many of them have gone literally to the melting-pot and lost their cultural distinctiveness and identity. But with the Negro it has

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been a different story. Persecution, suffering, with their greater discipline and pressure, have intensified the Negro heritage, and caste prejudice has isolated it from the powerful standardizing processes of American life. The Negro folk spirit has thus been less the victim of the quick ease and superficial spread that too often have parched the spiritual heritage of other stocks in the shallow soil of American materialism. So when America began to tire of being a cultural province of Europe, and began to think of building a distinctive and native American art, it became evident that with the almost complete obliteration of the American Indian and the lapse of most of the folk cultures that could have been preserved, we still had in the Negro folk spirit and its idioms a vital folk tradition in the land.

Obviously here was a promising mine or reservoir of materials for a native American art. Musicians, from Stephen Foster and Dvorák, on to Carpenter and Gershwin, dramatists like Eugene O'Neill, Marc Connelly, and Paul Green, poets like Vachel Lindsay and a host of others, novelists like Ellen Glasgow, DuBose Heyward, Julia Peterkin, took up the study and use of Negro materials as experimental and promising steps in the development of a native American art idiom. In American art of the present day, Negro forms and

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tradition are enjoying a belated but well-deserved victory. For by a curious irony these rejected elements in our social democracy are becoming the cornerstones of the new American art. And thus we have the most promising phenomenon of the whole situation -- a new collaboration, deliberate, purposeful, respectful, between the best elements of each race, the black artist promoting Negro art as racially representative, the white artist, as nationally characteristic.

Who can predict what the final effect of such a situation will be? Of course, it is as yet only a promise, a trend scarcely beyond its first strides. But, if successful, it will establish for other traditions, dormant in the mass-conformity of our national culture, a new principle of cultural diversity and reciprocity. And certainly, apart from the enrichment of American life, this would be one of the great solvents of racial antagonism and misunderstanding. If they will but see it, because of their complementary qualities, the two racial groups have great spiritual need, one of the other. It would be truly significant in the history of human culture, if two races so diverse should so happily collaborate, and the one return for the gift of a great civilization the reciprocal gift of the spiritual cross-fertilization of a great and distinctive national culture. At all events, the future

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history of the interaction between the Negro and his American setting will bear watching as having quite as important potentialities for America at large as for the Negro in particular.

Comment on the Books Recommended
This book has been selected to open up to the reader the position typical of enlightened liberalism on the race question.

Though written by the director of one of the most influential and pioneering of the philanthropic foundations 8 interested in helping Negro educational and social advance, it reflects none of the old paternalism. It also rises on both sides above the traditional sectionalism of the "Southern" and "Northern" points of view, and presents the Negro problem for what it really is, a national issue, only capable of solution through wide social tolerance and practical cooperation by all the elements concerned. Though optimistic, Mr. Embree has no easy-going optimism and no ready-made formula for the "solution of the race question." He everywhere stresses, with apparent hopefulness, the growing policy of self-help, local effort, and interracial counsel and action. Moreover, the book is a presentation in popular form of the latest

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positions of scientific study and the new objective history. It frankly disavows many of the traditional but false commonplaces still current about the Negro, about the facts of slavery, and about the superficially generalized attitudes attributed to the North and the South. Mr. Embree casts his conclusions decisively against the "melting pot" idea of our democracy. He says: "As to the future of the Brown Americans, I am a confirmed optimist. . . . Another hundred years will bring a transformation to the new race at least as spectacular as that of the past century. My fear is not that the Negro will not be absorbed into American life, but that he may be so completely `Americanized' that, ceasing to have any characteristic individuality, he will simply swell the ranks of standardized mediocrity."

In striking contrast of viewpoint, but substantial agreement of principle and conclusions, Dr. Robert Russa Moton,

Booker T. Washington's successor as principal of Tuskegee Institute, presents the Negro side of the case in What the Negro thinks. As the reader might expect, this book is a tempered and persuasive application of the philosophy of common sense to even the most controversial issues of the race problem. But although

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the author still puts great hope in and emphasis upon the traditional Washingtonian creed of goodwill, interracial counsel and Southern reconstruction, no concessions are made on equality of rights and opportunity for the Negro. There are extensive, careful discussions of the public effects of discrimination and separatist policies, and a grave though dispassionate warning about the ultimate costs and dangers of segregation, from which we have already quoted. It is further insisted that there can be no permanent or satisfactory solution of the race question without the full restoration of civic rights and the franchise, and the impartial maintenance of legal and social justice. This book may, therefore, be regarded as a statement of the unanimous agreement and minimum expectation and demands of intelligent Negro leadership of today. The reader should not miss the shrewd, characteristic humor of the chapter entitled "Solving the Negro Question with the Negro Left Out"; or overlook the breadth of Dr. Moton's concluding words: "Meanwhile nothing can contribute more toward the permanent establishment of our national welfare than the continued effort to realize for the humblest in our national life, black or white, that full measure of justice and equality of opportunity for which America stands as a symbol before all the world."

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For the reader's main historical guide, The Negro in our history (6th edition) by Carter G.

Woodson has been selected. Dr. Woodson is the founder and director of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, and most of his writings are direct products of the movement to acquaint the Negro with his own history and stimulate race pride and heighten group morale. The point of view of this book, however, is not propagandist, though its chief value comes from its correction of the startling omissions and mis-emphases of many standard American histories dealing with the slavery question and the Negro problem. The book is on the whole a well-documented objective history, and is especially competent in its interpretation of the Reconstruction. Its introductory chapters are also the best general statement available of the Negro's African background.
The classics of Negro biography are undoubtedly the two great autobiographies, My life and

times by Frederick Douglass and Up from slavery by Booker T. Washington. The reader who has time should read at least the selections from these reprinted in the Calverton

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Anthology. Their bearing, however, on the contemporary life of the Negro or its present-day trends of advance is remote; so the truer picture, individually and socially, is to be gained from the reading of Black Manhattan. There is the additional advantage of an opportunity to observe the close correlation between achievement and the more favorable social conditions of diminished discrimination, widened opportunity, readier recognition such as have prevailed in metropolitan New York and have resulted in that area's becoming the "refuge and Mecca of Negro talent" and the capital of Negro cultural achievement and advance.

This volume, published in 1925, presented the first composite picture of the movement known as the "Negro Renaissance." The book was

based on a project carried out a few months prior to its publication in the "Harlem Number" of the Survey Graphic, to present the younger generation mind and spirit in collaborated self-expression. The new social frontage of Negro life was included, but the main emphasis was upon the Negro's maturing racial spirit and its cultural expression in the arts. What was predicted as the probable acceptance and incorporation of the Negro artist and the Negro theme

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in the general body of contemporary art and culture has actually come about in the relatively short interim since its publication.

This anthology collection supplements The new Negro in several important ways, but principally in giving a cross

section of the historical development of the Negro's art and culture. Especially noteworthy is the group of essays treating the younger generation's view of the race problem, a subject outside the scope of the other anthology. The articles by Abram Harris and Thomas Dabney, reflecting the radical economic or Marxian interpretation of the Negro's history and the present issues of his problem as it cuts across the issues of the "class struggle" are cases in point. In these last two volumes of the reading course, the reader comes into first-hand touch with Negro artistic expression and social thought from many angles and varied schools of opinion. Nothing could serve better to correct the misleading general impression of narrowness and almost morbid concentration on the purely racial issues which can easily be gained from reading exclusively the "problem literature" of the subject.
For the more serious reader, and for study

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groups, citations have been added to two reference books: The Negro year book 1931-32, and The Negro in American civilization, by Charles S. Johnson.

Notes
1 By the last census (1930), the total Negro population is 11,891,143-9.7 per cent of the total population.

2 Smith, T. V. The American philosophy of equality. p. 85.

3 King, W. J. The Negro in American life. p. 66.

4 Johnson, C. S. The Negro in American civilization. p. 5.

5 The present illiteracy percentage is less than 11.

6 What the Negro thinks. p. 69 and p. 5.

7 These statements are by no means universally accepted. For another point of view on the source of the spirituals, see G. P. Jackson's White spirituals in the Southern uplands, Univ. of N. C. Press, 1933, chap. xx. For other theories on folklore origins, see Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee, U. S. Bureau of American Ethnology, 19th annual report. -- Pub.

8 The Julius Rosenwald Fund.