AS I SEE IT, the challenge which today confronts the Negro people in the United States can be stated in two propositions:
1. Freedom can be ours, here and now: the long-sought goal of full citizenship under the Constitution is now within our reach.
2. We have the power to achieve that goal: what we ourselves do will be decisive.
These two ideas are strongly denied or seriously doubted by many in our land, and the denial and doubt are demonstrated both by action and inaction in the crisis of our time. Let me begin by discussing the first proposition.
Those who are openly our enemies—the avowed upholders of the myth of White Supremacy—have bluntly stated their position on the matter: Not now and not ever shall the Jim Crow system be abolished. “Let me make this clear,” declared Eastland, the foremost spokesman for this group, in a Senate speech ten days after the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation, “the South will retain segregation.” And the strength of this viewpoint was shown when a hundred other Senators and Representatives from the South signed a manifesto in which they denounced the Court’s decision and pledged that they would resist its enforcement. The whole world has seen how these defiant words have become defiant deeds.
Others, who claim to be our friends, insist that the immediate enforcement of our lawful rights is not possible. We must wait, we are told, until the hearts of those who persecute us have softened—until Jim Crow dies of old age. This idea is called “Gradualism.” It is said to be a practical and constructive way to achieve the blessings of democracy for colored Americans. But the idea itself is but another form of race discrimination: in no other area of our society are lawbreakers granted an indefinite time to comply with the provisions of law. There is nothing in the 14th and 15th Amendments, the legal guarantees of our full citizenship rights, which says that the Constitution is to be enforced “gradually” where Negroes are concerned.
“Gradualism” is a mighty long road. It stretches back 100 long and weary years, and looking forward it has no end. Long before Emancipation was won, our people had learned that the promises of freedom in the future could not be trusted, and the folk-knowledge was put down in the bitter humor of this song from slavery days:
My old master promised me
When he died he’d set me free,
He lived so long that his head got bald
And he gave up the notion of dying at all.
Well, chattel slavery was finally abolished—not gradually but all at once. The slave-masters were never converted to liberal philosophy: they were crushed by the overwhelming force that was brought to bear against their rotten system. They were not asked to give up, penny by penny, the billions of dollars they owned in human property: the 13th Amendment took it all away in an instant.
Some of our “best friends” are really enemies, and “Gradualism” is but a mask for one of their double faces. But there are also well-intentioned white liberals and various Negro spokesmen, too, who honestly believe that the advancement of colored people can be made only gradually, that progress cannot be forced, that the reactionaries should not be pushed too hard, that five years or ten years, or even generations must pass before our civil wrongs can become civil rights. And there are many of my people who, looking at a place like Mississippi, sadly shake their heads and say that it’s going to be a long time before a real change comes about: the white bosses are too set in their ways and they are rotten mean to the bone.
The viewpoint that progress must be slow is rooted in the idea that democratic rights, as far as Negroes are concerned, are not inalienable and self-evident as they are for white Americans. Any improvement of our status as second-class citizens is seen as a matter of charity and tolerance. The Negro must rely upon the good will of those in places of power and hope that friendly persuasion can somehow and some day make blind prejudice see the light.
This view is dominant in the upper levels of government and society throughout the land. It is easy for the folks on the top to take a calm philosophical view and to tell those who bear the burden to restrain themselves and wait for justice to come. And, Lord knows, my people have been patient and long-suffering: they have a quality of human goodness, of tenderness and generosity that few others have. As the New York Times put it: “When one regards the violent history of nationalism and racism in the rest of the world, one must be thankful for the astonishing gentleness and good humor of the Negroes in the United States.”
But patience can wear out—and if the patience of some of us wore out before that of others, it doesn’t matter today. The plain fact is that a great many Negroes are thinking in terms of now, and I maintain and shall seek to prove that the goal of equal-rights-now can be achieved.
It has been said, and largely forgotten, that by the year 1963, the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, full freedom should be won. Well, I believe that still. The year of 1963 can indeed celebrate the winning of full citizenship rights, in fact and not only on paper, for every Negro in every city, county and state in this land. In 1963 a Negro statesman from Mississippi can be sitting in the Senate seat now disgraced by Eastland, just as the Negro Senator Hiram Revels once replaced the traitor Jeff Davis in that same office. I say that Jim Crow—and “Gradualism” along with it—can be buried so deep it can never rise again, and that this can be done now, in our own time!
Is this but a dream, a fantasy that “can’t happen here”? For an answer let us look with our eyes wide open at the world around us: let us look to the reality of our day, the changed situation which indicates that the time is ripe, that the opportunity is here.
The changed situation is this: Developments at home and abroad have made it imperative that democratic rights be granted to the Negro people without further delay. A century has passed since Frederick Douglass pointed out that “The relations subsisting between the white and black people of this country is the central question of the age,” and a half century since Dr. Du Bois proclaimed that “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the Color Line.” Today we see that the prophetic truth of those statements has grown a thousandfold, and that the time has come when the question of the age and the problem of the century must be resolved.
It is obvious today that the issue of Negro rights is a central question in our national life. A typical comment is that of the editors of Look magazine who see in this issue “America’s greatest legal, political and emotional crisis since the Civil War”; and typical, too, is the opinion of the New York Times that “a social revolution with profound implications for domestic accord and world leadership confronts this country today.” But in all of the discussion of this question which fills the press and the air waves and which resounds from platform, pulpit and conference table, little light is shed on the basic factors that are involved.
It is not merely a matter of “domestic accord” that is involved in our national crisis. The fact is that constitutional government in the United States cannot be maintained if Negroes are restricted to second-class citizenship. President Eisenhower, against his will and inclination, was compelled to recognize that the very structure of our government was imperiled by the defiance of Faubus in Little Rock; and for the first time since Reconstruction days Federal troops were moved in to uphold the Constitution. But the Administration and the dominant group it represents has not as yet been compelled to recognize an even more fundamental question: democracy cannot survive in a racist America. When a government spokesman appeals to the White Supremacists “to remember America as well as their prejudices,” he reflects the persistent blindness of those who still hope to eat their cake and have it, too.
I say that it is utterly false to maintain, as so many do, that the crux of the issue is personal prejudice. In a baseball game, an umpire’s decision may be based upon some prejudice in his mind, but a state law that makes it a crime for Negroes to play baseball with whites is a statute on the books. The Jim Crow laws and practices which deny equal rights to millions of Negroes in the South—and not only in the South!—are not private emotions and personal sentiments: they are a system of legal and extralegal force which violates and nullifies the Constitution of the United States.
We know that this condition has prevailed for many years, and it might be asked at this point: Why can’t it go on like this for years to come? What compelling factor in our national life calls for a change at this time?
The answer is: The interests of the overwhelming majority of the American people demand that the Negro question be solved. It is not simply a matter of justice for a minority: what is at stake is a necessity for all. Just as in Lincoln’s time the basic interests of the American majority made it necessary to strike down the system of Negro enslavement, so today those interests make it necessary to abolish the system of Negro second-class citizenship.
Increasingly it is becoming clear that the main roadblock to social progress in our country—for labor, for education, for public health and welfare—is that very group which stubbornly opposes equal rights for Negroes. The 100 Congressional signers of the Southern manifesto against desegregation are not only the foes of the Negro minority: they are a powerful reactionary force against the people as a whole. Holding office by virtue of Negro disfranchisement and reelected term after term by the votes of a handful of whites, these lawless Dixiecrats are lawmakers for the entire nation. The White Supremacy they espouse does not elevate the white workers in industry or the poor white farmers, and they have helped promote and maintain the economic process that has drained off most of the wealth from Southern resources and has made that section much poorer than the rest of the country.
The upholders of “states’ rights” against the Negro’s rights are at the same time supporters of the so-called “right-to-work” laws against the rights of the trade unions. The reactionary laws which have undermined the gains of Roosevelt’s New Deal—the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, the anti-foreign-born Walter-McCarran Act, the thought-control Smith Act—all were strongly backed by the Dixiecrats in Congress. Until their political power is broken, there can be no real social or economic progress for the common people anywhere, North or South. Indeed, it is clear that not only will there be no progress, but there will be further retrogression unless this political cancer is removed from public life.
The attention of the nation is focused now on the words and deeds of those who are resisting the Supreme Court’s decision that segregated schools are unlawful. The national conscience, which has for so long tolerated segregation as a “local custom,” cannot and will not permit the defenders of Jim Crow to substitute mob violence and anarchy for constitutional government. The conflict today pertains mainly to the schools, but the signers of the Southern manifesto were not wrong when they saw the Court’s decision as a threat to the “habits, customs, traditions and way of life” of White Supremacy. If the evil doctrine of “separate but equal” was struck down in reference to public schools, how can it be lawful in any other area of public life?
The die has been cast: segregation must go. The White Citizens Councils may foment mob resistance, and Southern senators and governors may rant and rave against a new Reconstruction, and the President may try to look the other way—but the vast majority of Americans, the indifferent and lukewarm as well as the most progressive, are not going to give up their democratic heritage in order to deny that heritage to fellow citizens who are colored.
We know, of course, that the democratic-minded majority is slow to move, and that the poison of race prejudice has deeply corroded the whole of our national life. The make-up of the Federal government is not too different from the state governments in the South: it, too, is a white man’s government. Not a single Negro is a member of the powerful Senate and there are only three among the 435 members of the House of Representatives. Legislation in behalf of civil rights could not be defeated or emasculated by the Dixiecrats without the support of Congressmen from other parts of the country. In a later chapter more will be said about the situation of Negroes outside the South, but suffice it to say here that hypocrisy concerning Negro rights has existed throughout our land ever since the Declaration of Independence affirmed the truth that “all men are created equal.” And so it must be recognized that if there were not another factor in addition to the domestic one, the changed situation I speak of might not exist.
That other factor—relentless, powerful, compelling—is the pressure of world opinion against racism in the United States. This pressure is widely recognized in our national life, and both the pressure and our recognition of it are constantly growing. The case of Emmett Till, lynched in Mississippi, and of Autherine Lucy, barred from the University of Alabama, aroused a storm of condemnation from beyond our borders; and the story of Little Rock—in words and pictures-shook the world. Indeed, the pressure of world opinion was itself an important factor in the very decision of the Supreme Court which evoked the defiance of the Arkansas governor. In his argument in support of school desegregation, the Attorney General of the United States reminded the high tribunal that “The existence of race discrimination against minority groups in the United States has an adverse effect upon our relations with other countries.”
There is a lack of understanding in American life, however, as to the sources of this pressure which has been seen as a hostile force, endangering this country’s rightful (and self-appointed) place of world leadership. The source of the pressure is said to be “Communist propaganda” among the colored peoples who comprise the majority of the world’s population. Since the pressure arose from the dissemination of “lies” and “slander,” it could be done away with by a “truth crusade” which would show that the situation of the American Negro was to be envied rather than deplored. Although it was evident to Negroes generally that the pressure could and did benefit the struggle for our rights (the speedy desegregation of schools, restaurants and hotels in Washington was an obvious case in point), a number of prominent Negroes offered their services in the grand campaign to take the pressure off! A rather unflattering comment about these individuals was recently made by a columnist in the New York Amsterdam News:
“Our government has been employing Negro intellectuals, entertainers, ministers and many others to play the roles of ambassadorial Uncle Toms for years. They are supposed to show their well-fed, well-groomed faces behind the Iron Curtain as living proof that everyone is free and equal in the U.S., and the color bar is a myth.”
Now, it is not my intention to engage in personal criticisms of any kind, and I know a number of performing artists who went on these government-sponsored tours because they needed work and who were out to show the world, as they did, that the American Negro has talent and dignity deserving of respect anywhere. Yet it must be said that the Negro spokesmen who have set out to calm the clamor of world humanity against racism in America have done a grievous disservice to both their people and their country. To proclaim abroad that “A peaceful revolution has occurred overnight; it is a mark of distinction to be a Negro in the United States”—and those words were actually uttered by a well-known Negro minister to an Asian audience—can do nothing except to discredit the speaker.
By now it should be recognized by all that this global advertising campaign to deny the obvious has failed in its purpose. Facts still speak louder than words. The charge that the foreign protests on this issue are provoked by “Communist propaganda” expresses contempt for the intelligence and sensibilities not only of the colored peoples but of the democratic-minded people of all races and creeds. Of course, the Communists of the world denounce racism: that’s nothing new and it seems rather silly to charge that this is some kind of newfangled weapon of the “cold war” when anyone can go to the library and read that Karl Marx said, a hundred years ago, that “Labor in a white skin can never be free while labor in a black skin is branded.” But to assert that the revulsion of world humanity against racist outrages in America is simply the result of Communist agitation can only insult public opinion abroad, just as American public opinion rejected as nonsense Eastland’s charge that our Supreme Court has been “indoctrinated and brainwashed by left-wing pressure groups.”
What, then, has brought about the persistent and growing pressure from all parts of the world on this issue? One cause is the shattering experience of World War II—the untold havoc and horror committed by the Nazis in their drive to win domination for their so-called Master Race. Millions were slain and millions more suffered disaster. The world has learned the terrible lesson of Hitler: racism, backed by the power and technology of a modern industrial state, is a monster that must never be unleashed again. What difference is there between the Master Race idea of Hitler and the White Supremacy creed of Eastland? Who can convince the European peoples that the burning cross of the white-robed Klan is different from the swastika of the Brownshirts? America, of course, is not a fascist nation, but the deep-rooted racism here and its violent outbursts arouse the worst fears of those who survived the holocaust of Hitlerism.
Those who tell the world that racism in American life is merely a fading hangover from the past, and that it is largely limited to one section of our country, cannot explain away the infamous Walter-McCarran Immigration Act passed by Congress since the war. No decree of Nazi Germany was more foully racist than this American law which is, in the words of Senator Lehman, “based on the same discredited racial theories from which Adolf Hitler developed the infamous Nuremberg Laws.” Look how our immigration quotas are allotted: from Ireland’s 3 million people, 17,000 may come to our country each year; but from India, with her 400 millions, the quota is—100! Usually we Negroes do not think much about immigration laws because we’ve been here for centuries, but in our midst there are many from the West Indies, and their talents and vitality have been important to our communities far beyond their numbers. Under the Walter-McCarran law, with all of its provisions to reduce “non-Nordic” immigration, the number of Negroes who can come from the Caribbean or anywhere else has been drastically cut down.
After the defeat of Hitlerism, the nations came together in a worldwide organization; and our country, which had not belonged to the old League of Nations, became a leading force in the United Nations. Founded in San Francisco and making its headquarters in New York, the U.N. brought the eyes of the world upon the United States. From the outset, Negro leaders of vision saw in the new organization a new opportunity to win backing for their people’s democratic demands. Shortly before he was ousted from his leading post in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (which he had helped to found), Dr. Du Bois addressed an appeal for Negro rights to the U.N. In that historic document, he pointed out that racism in America was now an international problem. He wrote:
“A discrimination practiced in the United States against her own citizens and to a large extent in contravention of her own laws, cannot be persisted in without infringing upon the rights of the peoples of the world…. This question, then, which is without doubt primarily an internal and national question, becomes inevitably an international question, and will in the future become more and more international as the nations draw together.”
That is exactly what has come to pass, and those in our midst who were too blind to see that truth ten years ago can read it today in the headlines of the world. The U.N. itself reflects the great changes that have come about “as the nations draw together.” Today there are twenty-nine nations in the Asian-African bloc in the U.N., and as the roll call of the General Assembly is taken we hear the names of new nations that are members now—among them African nations like Ghana and Sudan and others. Like a great barometer the U.N. registers the changing climate of the world as the wave of colonial liberation sweeps onward.
Here, then, in the changing bases of power abroad, is the main source of that pressure for changes at home. The era of White Supremacy, the imperialist domination of the East by a handful of Western nations, is rapidly coming to an end. A new era is being born. We, the Negro people of the United States, and of the Caribbean area as well, are a part of the rising colored peoples of the world. This is not merely a matter of racial identification and common sentiments: the course of history has made it so. The plunder of Africa by the nations of Europe, which brought our ancestors to this hemisphere as slaves, was the beginning of the era that brought most of Asia, too, under white domination. Now when that era is ending, it is inevitable that our own destiny is involved.
Freedom is a hard-bought thing and millions are still in chains, but they strain toward the new day drawing near. In Kenya Colony, for example, the African patriots—the so-called Mau Mau—are hunted like wild animals and the people’s leader, Jomo Kenyatta, is jailed. I knew this brave man well in the years that I lived in London; like Nehru of India and many others from colonial lands who were my friends in England, he dreamed of freedom for his people. Well, Nehru was jailed in India, and many thousands more; but the road to independence and power ran through those prison walls, and Kenyatta, too, will travel on.
A new China has arisen, young in strength and ancient in culture—a world power of half a billion people. This China is a mighty big fact not to “recognize,” yet there are some stubborn statesmen in Washington who insist that “China” consists of the island hideout where Chiang Kai-shek and his outlaw gang are living off the American taxpayers’ money. But the real China’s neighbors in Asia—the people of India, Pakistan, Burma, Ceylon, Korea, Vietnam, Indonesia—recognize in her a powerful friend. So Prime Minister Nehru is happy to shake hands with Chairman Mao, and Burma’s premier, U Nu, has this to say about the leading power in the Orient:
“Although Burma has disliked communism at home, we are not meddling in the affairs of the Chinese who choose communism to suit their circumstances. Communist leaders in China have abolished foreign economic exploitation and wiped out bribery and corruption for the first time, thus winning the admiration of fellow Asians. They are building a new world for their masses.”
(We Negroes should realize, when we read in the daily newspapers denunciations of a newly emancipated country like China, that what we are told “ain’t necessarily so.” We might well remember that Douglass in his time, defending liberated Haiti from the newspaper charges that it was “a nation of cutthroats and robbers,” observed that “white Americans find it hard to tell the truth about colored people. They see us with a dollar in their eyes.”)
Washington may not yet recognize the new People’s Republic of China that has arisen—and it certainly has changed a lot since the “good old days” when Europeans put up signs in the parks of Shanghai: “No DOGS OR CHINESE ALLOWED”— but the great conference of Asian and African free nations at Bandung welcomed new China to a place of leadership in their midst.
It is high time for Negro leadership to take a new look at the world beyond our borders and to stop parroting the fearful wails of Washington officialdom that Asia and Africa may be “lost to the Free World.” No doubt there are some folks who stand to lose a great deal as the colonial peoples take over their own lands and resources, but what in the world do Negro Americans have to lose over there? Our problem is how to get some of that freedom and dignity that other colored folks are getting these days. What we have to be concerned about is what we can get, and not be worrying our heads about what the Big White Folks might lose!
Negro leadership would do well to ponder the significance of a recent event at the United Nations. On September 19, 1957, Mr. Dulles made a speech at the U.N. and although he said nothing new, repeating his stock charges that in Asia and Africa the Communists were “inciting nationalism to break all ties with the West,” his words were reported throughout the country. The newspapers and radio ignored what the next speaker said, but I believe that his remarks had historical significance. The speaker was Ako Adjei, Minister of Justice of Ghana (on the west coast of Africa from whence so many of our ancestors came), and he told the General Assembly:
“… Ghana has a special responsibility and obligation towards all African peoples or peoples of African descent throughout the world who are struggling to free themselves from foreign rule, or even who, by the mere reason of their color, are denied the enjoyment of the very elementary civil and political rights which the Constitutions of their own states guarantee to all their citizens. I should like to request all Members of the United Nations to take note that the new State of Ghana is concerned with the freedom of all African peoples and also with the treatment that is meted out to all peoples of African descent, wherever they may be in any part of the world. We appeal to the conscience of the nations, great or small, to join in the crusade for the observance of fundamental human rights and freedoms which are enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations.” (Emphasis added.)
Amen, brother, amen! I am sure your message will be warm in the hearts of Africa’s children all over this land.
Yes, the peoples of the free colored nations are our natural friends: their growing strength is also ours. When the Ambassador from India is Jim Crowed in Texas, and when the Finance Minister of Ghana is Jim Crowed in Delaware, they and their people feel exactly as we do. Diplomatic apologies are made to them, but they know that the President and the Secretary of State make no apology or restitution to the 16 millions of us who daily undergo the indignities of race discrimination, nor to the millions of others—the American Indians, the Mexican-Americans, the Puerto Ricans and people of Asian descent—who are insulted and outraged in this “Land of the Free.” And so it is that the colored peoples, two-thirds of all mankind, are shouting that the Walls of Jericho must come tumbling down.
There are some diehard White Supremacists in our country who scorn the thought that public opinion abroad must be taken into account. Governor Timmerman of South Carolina told the press that “India isn’t interested in the Negro–or the white man. It is ridiculous to think that these people worry about what Americans do.” And he went on to advise that diplomats from colored nations should, when traveling in the South, stay “in the best available night hotels.”
But fortunately for us—and even more fortunately for the country as a whole—the controlling group in national leadership is not that ignorant. Whatever may be their personal prejudices, the men who direct our foreign policy know beyond the shadow of a doubt that the United States cannot afford to ignore the pressure that comes from abroad. Race discrimination can cost us much more than national prestige: it can drastically hurt our national economy. Those who are vitally concerned with foreign trade and investment, with the raw materials our industries must get from other lands, are much more realistic and infinitely more powerful than are people like Eastland, Timmerman and Faubus. Faced with the fact that our country must co-exist, if it is to exist at all, with the new nations that have emerged, there can be no doubt that the powers-that-be in America will have to reckon with the new situation.
The viewpoint that I have presented above is not a hasty appraisal of the headline news and current events: it is based upon an outlook which I have had for many years. Long before the “cold war” began—during World War II when our country was an ally of the Soviet Union against Hitlerism—I pointed to certain new developments that would bring about a changed situation for my people. In an interview published in the New York Times on April 12, 1944, I said:
“The problem of the Negro in this country is a very serious one. We in America criticize many nations. We know that international conscience has great influence in spite of wars. One important part of the solution of the Negro problem here will be the pressure of other countries on America from the outside. There are 100,000 Negroes now in the Army in the English theatre of operations. Americans wanted their segregation, as at home. The English, however, insisted upon their being mixed in, without segregation. This shows the possibility of action within the Anglo-Saxon world, and it also shows the power of foreign opinion.”
While pointing to the pressure from the outside, I was also convinced that the pressure from the Negro people themselves was also a factor that would have to be reckoned with, and I said so in these words:
“This is obviously not a race war—it turns, rather, on the idea of peoples that are free and those that are not free. The American Negro has changed his temper. Now he wants his freedom. Whether he is smiling at you or not, he wants his freedom. The old exploitation of peoples is definitely past.”
That was my viewpoint more than a decade ago and that is my stand today.
I have outlined in this chapter the factors which, I believe, make it possible for Negro rights to be achieved at this time. But, as we well know, opportunity is not enough. No situation, however favorable, can solve a problem. “If there is no struggle,” Douglass taught us, “there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” So let us next discuss the struggle that still must be waged, and the Negro power that can win our demand.