Istayed on, and the lane leading to my barn office remained empty. They did not come for me.
I hired a Negro youth to come and help me clean up my parents’ house so it would be spotless for the new owners. The youth knew me and had no reticence in talking since he was sure I was “one of them” so to speak. Both Negroes and whites have gained this certainty from the experiment - because I was a Negro for six weeks, I remained partly Negro or perhaps essentially Negro.
While we swept and burned old newspapers, we talked.
“Why do whites hate us - we don’t hate them? he asked.
We had a long conversation during which he brought out the obvious fact that whites teach their children to call them “niggers.” He said this happened to him all the time and that he would not even go into white neighborhoods because it sickened him to be called that. He said revealing things:
“Your children don’t hate us, do they?”
“God, no,” I said. “Children have to be taught that kind of filth. We’d never permit ours to learn it.”
“Dr. Cook’s like that. His little girl called me nigger and he told her if he ever heard her say that again he’d spank her till she couldn’t sit down.”
The Negro does not understand the white any more than the white understands the Negro. I was dismayed to see the extent to which this youth exaggerated - how could he do otherwise? - the feelings of the whites toward Negroes. He thought they all hated him.
The most distressing repercussion of this lack of communication has been the rise in racism among Negroes, justified to some extent, but a grave symptom nonetheless. It only widens the gap that men of good will are trying desperately to bridge with understanding and compassion. It only strengthens the white racist’s cause. The Negro who turns now, in the moment of near- realization of his liberties, and bares his fangs at a man’s whiteness, makes the same tragic error the white racist has made.
And this is happening on a wider scale. Too many of the more militant leaders are preaching Negro superiority. I pray that the Negro will not miss his chance to rise to greatness, to build from the strength gained through his past suffering and, above all, to rise beyond vengeance.
If some spark does set the keg afire, it will be a senseless tragedy of ignorant against ignorant, injustice answering injustice - a holocaust that will drag down the innocent and right-thinking masses of human beings.
Then we will all pay for not having cried for justice long ago.