Time and the Negro
Washington WHEN I came down to Washington I did not know how to treat the negroes. 1 was self-conscious. Up north there were few blacks. Once as a student I saw a negro dancing with a college-girl in New England. It gave me a queer feeling, completely instinctive and deep inside me. It had nothing to do with nationality at all. I had not .known I had racial feel- ings before ; I could not believe it then. I was as ignorant of the matter as an Englishman.
Washington is a border-city. Across the Potomac, in Virginia, negroes move to the back of the buses. Toilets are marked " White " and " Colored." Northern negroes feel the restric- tions cumulatively as they progress south, finally into the Deep South. In the other direction the farther north you go the lighter the negroes become. Miscegenation, frowned upon or illegal, still goes on. The taxi-driver who drove me home the other night cursed the negroes. He was a coarse, violent man. Here in Washington he competes on equal terms with taxis driven by negroes, but this was not his complaint. He had bought a home, and somebody on his block had sold a house to a negro. Once that happened it meant that all the other whites would sell out. too. Values would drop. The taxi-driver was selling his home as fast as he could, but he wotild take a loss.
Out of an American population of 150 million, 15 million are negroes. In Washington the ratio is about one in three. Whites and blacks go to different schools here, but the quality of the education is substantially the same. Segregated living areas are less sharply drawn than they were, but on the whole negroes compose an inferior or servant class. Yet even while I have lived here absorbing changes have occurred. .
Just the other day the " D.A.R." hall was made available to negro performers. The amusingly preposterous Daughters of the American Revolution, a patriotic-genealogical organisation, barred a performance by Marian Anderson a decade ago, to the indignation of most of the country. Last month it quietly and finally rescinded its old discrimination. At the same time another struggle has been won. The big National Theatre would not sell tickets to negroes. It was consequently boycotted by national theatrical groups. For two years America's capital had no spoken drama. Then a somewhat smaller theatre, hitherto devoted to that robust and bawdy American institution known as " burlesque," entered the void. It invited top plays, ended segregation and has been rousingly successful. Instead of riots there was calm. In Washington the District of Columbia Medical Society has just voted, two to one, to admit qualified negroes. The local Howard University. for negroes. has an ' excellent medical school. News of relaxation of old segregation bans is of almost constant occurrence.
The oppressive treatment of negroes is the basis for world-wide Russian propaganda, and does serious damage to the United States in India, Asia and Africa, let alone Europe. It would be idle to pretend that the affirmation of equality in the American Constitution is being fulfilled. The authors of that document never even considered blacks as " people." Yet improvement in negro status has so much accelerated at this half-century mark that it requires re-examination. Never was a problem so different on the short-range and the long-range view. Judged by ordinary standards of racial equality, the current position of the negro in many States is disheartening. But judged by the distance the negro has come since 1900. or even since 1940. the situation is rather inspiring. . Consider the problem. For 225 years chattel-slavery, begun by English colonists, was legal. Six million Africans entered in bondage. The economy of a whole region was based upon it. Suddenly a. terrible war devastated the south, ended slavery and turned former serfs, 90 per cent. illiterate, into men who were " free "—in the technical sense that they could no longer be bought or their children auctioned off. In many areas blacks out- numbered whites. The deepest and most basic fears prevailed. Little provision was made for the transition. That was in 1865— only an eye-wink of time ago as sociology measures tese things. I think there is nothing in British history even remotely re- sembling the problem ; perhaps nothing in all history. Yet it can be maintained that the negro has advanced further in 85 years than any similar group in the world.
What makes the thing dramatic is that at any particular point since 1865 the negro's status could be justly attacked as out- rageous, while at the same time from a comparative view the improvement was hopeful and inspiring. In 1900 the south was still shadowed by post-war racial fears. These found expression in mob-violence. Lynchings were often accompanied by bestial inhumanity. There were 115 of them in 1900. But lynchings are now virtually a thing of the past. The descending statistical graph kept by Tuskegee Institute for 50 years is like a fever-chart of a nation coming out of a hideous illness.
The south fought to restrain negro voting after the war, and by 1910 restrictive State legislation had deprived almost all blacks of the franchis. But simultaneously a counter-development was going on ; a whole race was being educated and achieving higher economic status. Some of the fear abated. No better index of racial improvement could be offered than the fact that by now ten of the fifteen southern States have abolished poll-tax laws by which disenfranchisement was largely achieved. It would be untrue to say that negroes now vote with the freedom of whites in these States, but tens of thousands of them do vote, and every year the number increases.
The complexities of racial relations in a transition society allow a' brilliant negro like Ralph Bunche to win honour as statesman and diplomat, and yet suffer the indignity of being refused a room at a Washington hotel. Two facts, however, stand out. The negroes have come an immense distance, and the rate of improvement is accelerating. Statistics are offered by George Schuyler, negro journalist, in a recent article. 1,250,000 negroes are members of trade unions, and of twenty unions that still barred negroes in 1945 six have ended segregation in the past four years. Thirteen banks are owned by negroes, 74 credit unions, 20 savings and loan associations, and 204 insurance companies, of which the 52 largest have 5100 million in assets and $1,000 million of insurance in force. Two hundred news- papers are printed and published by negroes, with circulations of 3,000,000. Today 7,000 negroes graduate annually from college. and 80,000 are in attendance. One of the most important developments has been recent Supreme Court insistence that southern colleges must admit negroes and the mild manner in which this necessity' has finally been accepted. One thousand negroes now attend southern white colleges. Mr. Schuyler reports negro life expectancy still well below the white-60 years as contrasted with 67 years. But here, as everywhere, he finds the gap narrowing. " The improvement in the relations between whites and negroes has been in geometrical pro- gression ; the gains in the past ten years surpassing those of the past forty."
For years Communists have tried to win support from negroes. Under any proper theory of oppression they should have done well. Actually their efforts appear negligible. This arises from several factors. First, the economic and social progress of negroes is visible to anybody. The great experiment of social integration has been based on amelioration, not revolution. Secondly, negroes understand, even though Europe and Moscow have forgotten, the basic radicalism and inherent promise of the American tradition incorporated in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. This is one of the most explosive social ideals ever put on paper, and it is still at work. Finally, case after case shows that the Communists are less interested in specific negro victims than are such orthodox agencies as trade unions, the efficient Association for the Advancement of Colored People or champions drawn from church and liberal groups. One can- not blame the Communists. I suppose, for seizing for propaganda the chance which ugly cases gi'e them, though the cold-blooded way in which they arc prepared to sacrifice the victim to get a martyr is rather terrible. Almost every year there is some American cause célèbre featuring a negro. Often he is charged with rape and sentenced to death. He excites interest, commiseration and a sense of out- rage all over the world. The case of Willie McGee, a poverty- stricken grocery-boy, is the latest. McGee was executed a few weeks ago in Mississippi for rape—a State where no court has ever yet imposed the maximum sentence for the same crime on a white man. Nothing can be said in defence of the inherent injustice of applying a stiffer penalty for the same crime on one race than on another, and about the best that can be added on this score is that this is the present stopping-point to which justice for negroes has come in the deep south. The night-riding Klansmen who followed the Civil War are things of the past. (South Carolina a month ago made it illegal even to wear masked robes.) Judicial fair-play for negroes has vastly improved. The Mississippi Supreme Court threw out two trials of McGee, the first on the ground of mob domination of the local court, and the second on the ground that no negro was on the jury. The third conviction went up to the U.S. Supreme Court for review—a court which has spoken out repeatedly, in noble language, for racial equality. In this instance the High Court examined the case, declined to intervene, and thereby indicated that a majority was satisfied. The execution followed. This is a sample case for world Communist propaganda. McGee, it is true, suffered a penalty never yet imposed in Mississippi on a white man. Yet the trial and evidence indicate that he was guilty.
The American negro question is not solved, but recent progress is vastly encouraging. One can weigh present, discrimination and feel sad. or the unprecedented progress and feel glad. There can be no doubt of the direction things are taking. Only time is wanted.
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