Voices in Our Blood

by Jon Meacham

  It is significant, too, that the critical letters were overwhelmingly emotional, often anti-Semitic, and, when unsigned as many were, contained filthy personal attacks and threats. Some, of course, came from people honestly disturbed over the Supreme Court ruling and wondering whether the Councils’ program of economic terrorism is not the South’s only anti-integration weapon.

  A man in Alaska sent $100 to be used as I saw fit to oppose the Councils. Three priests, each from different communities and one of them 300 miles away, came to Greenville within a few days of each other to offer aid and comfort to this battered Episcopalian. But an unidentified telephone caller told me to get out of town before I was carried out.

  Less trivial than threats or insults have been the efforts at boycott, only spasmodic before the Look article appeared, but now accelerated. We’ve lost circulation in some areas, but we’ve managed to hold to our 12,500 average. We’ve been hurt a little in our commercial printing and office-supply sidelines. So far, none of our advertisers has knuckled under to the arrogant demands of Council spokesmen that they join the Councils, or taken away their advertising from us on penalty of losing the trade of Council members. This economic weapon was announced last summer as being planned for use only against Negroes who tried to vote or enter their children in white schools, but it has been turned against anyone who doesn’t go along with the Councils.

  It seems to me that the general reaction to the legislature’s blast, and the failure so far of any boycott, points up something that our non-Southern friends possibly don’t know. The thinking people of Mississippi and the South are a long way ahead of their politicians; and those of us who seem to be in a completely rebuffed minority aren’t as alone or as out of step as legislators and Councils might lead the outsider to believe.

  I don’t mean that many white Southerners are willing to have public schools integrated now, especially in the Deep South where numerical pressures are greatest. But they know that inflammatory political behavior and the formation of vigilante groups aren’t the answer any more than would be a Supreme Court edict ordering complete integration next fall. There must be a middle ground.

  That brings up something personal. I’ve been pretty much a middle-of-the-roader all my life. Some of my fellow Southerners think otherwise. They’ve been conditioned largely by political demagogues to believe that anybody who challenges extremism in the South is in league with the Supreme Court, the N.A.A.C.P., the Communist party, the mass-circulation magazines, and everybody north of the Mason-Dixon Line to destroy the Southern way of life. There’s a lot of it I do want destroyed. There’s a lot I want to keep.

  And some of my non-Southern correspondents have been wrong also, though in a kindlier way. They envision a dangerous life for the Southern dissenter, or, at the best, a social and economic martyrdom. That, I am glad to say, just isn’t so, though it could have been twenty years ago.

  We live normal small-town lives in Greenville. That means we’re busy with all kinds of matters besides racial problems. According to my calendar for the general period between the Look article and the legislature’s resolution, I was chairman, so help me, of the Rotary Club’s Ladies’ Night; planned a spring boating weekend with the skipper of the Sea Scouts whose unofficial flagship is the Mistuh Charley, and gave a wiener roast for the Cub Scouts, including my youngest, whose den father I am; met three times with my fellow directors of the Chamber of Commerce; awarded the annual Democrat-Times plaques to the outstanding man and woman citizen; served as ringmaster for our neighborhood teen-agers’ Cypress Saddle Club show; met with our monthly discussion group, a dozen business and professional men, in my home; judged a college and high school newspaper contest; went to two square dances; attended the Tulane University annual Board of Visitors meeting; began work on a talk for the convention of the Mississippi Bankers Association; helped my wife entertain for two engaged daughters of friends, and for each of our two older sons home from college and school for Easter holidays; planned a board meeting of the Mississippi Historical Society, of which I’m president; and worked with my wife on the 150-year history of the Episcopal Diocese of Louisiana. This accounting is only partial, but it doesn’t leave much time for scalawagging.

  A great many of my friends, and uncounted thousands of other Southerners, are too busy to spend time on boycotts and threats even were they so inclined. A good many other thousands, however, do seem to have the time and inclination, too. The Southern struggle, it seems to me, is not so much between two races as between these groups. In four or five Deep Southern states, the Supreme Court and the Negro stand on the sidelines. In these states, integration is distant. In their public schools, it will be no more than token for as far ahead as I can see. The gradual adjustment will be aided by accompanying improvement in the Negro’s economic status; by Negro migration which will reduce the pressure of numbers; by the tolerance of those who today are our young; and by the persistent growth of the idea that democracy and Christianity and man’s responsibility for his brother are all facets of the same bright dream.

  I know that, against these forces, the South’s braying demagogues, its Klans and Councils and Southern Gentlemen, Inc., cannot forever stand. As our eldest son, who is twenty, disdainfully told our ten-year-old, who has been delighted with all the excitement:

  “If you think this is something, you should have been around when I was in the fifth grade. . . .”

  Or when I was.

  Harlem Is Nowhere

  Harper’s Magazine, August 1964

  RALPH ELLISON

  To live in Harlem is to dwell in the very bowels of the city; it is to pass a labyrinthine existence among streets that explode monotonously skyward with the spires and crosses of churches and clutter under foot with garbage and decay. Harlem is a ruin—many of its ordinary aspects (its crimes, its casual violence, its crumbling buildings with littered areaways, ill-smelling halls, and vermin-invaded rooms) are indistinguishable from the distorted images that appear in dreams, and which, like muggers haunting a lonely hall, quiver in the waking mind with hidden and threatening significance. Yet this is no dream but the reality of well over four hundred thousand Americans; a reality which for many defines and colors the world. Overcrowded and exploited politically and economically, Harlem is the scene and symbol of the Negro’s perpetual alienation in the land of his birth.

  But much has been written about the social and economic aspects of Harlem; I am here interested in its psychological character—a character that arises from the impact between urban slum conditions and folk sensibilities. Historically, American Negroes are caught in a vast process of change that has swept them from slavery to the condition of industrial man in a space of time so telescoped (a bare eighty-five years) that it is possible literally for them to step from feudalism into the vortex of industrialism simply by moving across the Mason-Dixon Line.

  This abruptness of change and the resulting clash of cultural factors within the Negro personality account for some of the extreme contrasts found in Harlem, for both its negative and its positive characteristics. For if Harlem is the scene of the folk-Negro’s death agony, it is also the setting of his transcendence. Here it is possible for talented youths to leap through the development of decades in a brief twenty years, while beside them white-haired adults crawl in the feudal darkness of their childhood. Here a former cotton picker develops the sensitive hands of a surgeon, and men whose grandparents still believe in magic prepare optimistically to become atomic scientists. Here the grandchildren of those who possessed no written literature examine their lives through the eyes of Freud and Marx, Kierkegaard and Kafka, Malraux and Sartre. It explains the nature of a world so fluid and shifting that often within the mind the real and the unreal merge, and the marvelous beckons from behind the same sordid reality that denies its existence.

  Hence the most surreal fantasies are acted out upon the streets of Harlem; a man ducks in and out of traffic shouting and throwing imaginary grenades that actua
lly exploded during World War I; a boy participates in the rape-robbery of his mother; a man beating his wife in a park uses boxing “science” and observes Marquess of Queensberry rules (no rabbit punching, no blows beneath the belt); two men hold a third while a lesbian slashes him to death with a razor blade; boy gangsters wielding homemade pistols (which in the South of their origin are but toy symbols of adolescent yearning for manhood) shoot down their young rivals. Life becomes a masquerade, exotic costumes are worn every day. Those who cannot afford to hire a horse wear riding habits; others who could not afford a hunting trip or who seldom attend sporting events carry shooting sticks.

  For this is a world in which the major energy of the imagination goes not into creating works of art, but to overcome the frustrations of social discrimination. Not quite citizens and yet Americans, full of the tensions of modern man, but regarded as primitives, Negro Americans are in desperate search for an identity. Rejecting the second-class status assigned them, they feel alienated and their whole lives have become a search for answers to the questions: Who am I, What am I, Why am I, and Where? Significantly, in Harlem the reply to the greeting, “How are you?” is very often, “Oh, man, I’m nowhere”—a phrase revealing an attitude so common that it has been reduced to a gesture, a seemingly trivial word. Indeed, Negroes are not unaware that the conditions of their lives demand new definitions of terms like primitive and modern, ethical and unethical, moral and immoral, patriotism and treason, tragedy and comedy, sanity and insanity.

  But for a long time now—despite songs like the “Blow Top Blues” and the eruption of expressions like frantic, buggy, and mad into Harlem’s popular speech, doubtless a word-magic against the states they name—calm in face of the unreality of Negro life becomes increasingly difficult. And while some seek relief in strange hysterical forms of religion, in alcohol and drugs, others learn to analyze the causes for their predicament and join with others to correct them.

  In relation to their Southern background, the cultural history of Negroes in the North reads like the legend of some tragic people out of mythology, a people which aspired to escape from its own unhappy homeland to the apparent peace of a distant mountain; but which, in migrating, made some fatal error of judgment and fell into a great chasm of mazelike passages that promise ever to lead to the mountain but end ever against a wall. Not that a Negro is worse off in the North than in the South, but that in the North he surrenders and does not replace certain important supports to his personality. He leaves a relatively static social order in which, having experienced its brutality for hundreds of years—indeed, having been formed within it and by it—he has developed those techniques of survival to which Faulkner refers as “endurance,” and an ease of movement within explosive situations which makes Hemingway’s definition of courage, “grace under pressure,” appear mere swagger. He surrenders the protection of his peasant cynicism—his refusal to hope for the fulfillment of hopeless hopes—and his sense of being “at home in the world” gained from confronting and accepting (for day-to-day living, at least) the obscene absurdity of his predicament. Further, he leaves a still authoritative religion which gives his life a semblance of metaphysical wholeness; a family structure which is relatively stable; and a body of folklore—tested in life-and-death terms against his daily experience with nature and the Southern white man—that serves him as a guide to action.

  These are the supports of Southern Negro rationality (and, to an extent, of the internal peace of the United States); humble, but of inestimable psychological value,*1 they allow Southern Negroes to maintain their almost mystical hope for a future of full democracy—a hope accompanied by an irrepressible belief in some Mecca of equality, located in the North and identified by the magic place names New York, Chicago, Detroit. A belief sustained (as all myth is sustained by ritual) by identifying themselves ritually with the successes of Negro celebrities, by reciting their exploits and enumerating their dollars, and by recounting the swiftness with which they spiral from humble birth to headline fame. And doubtless the blasting of this dream is as damaging to Negro personality as the slum scenes of filth, disorder, and crumbling masonry in which it flies apart.

  When Negroes are barred from participating in the main institutional life of society, they lose far more than economic privileges or the satisfaction of saluting the flag with unmixed emotions. They lose one of the bulwarks which men place between themselves and the constant threat of chaos. For whatever the assigned function of social institutions, their psychological function is to protect the citizen against the irrational, incalculable forces that hover about the edges of human life like cosmic destruction lurking within an atomic stockpile.

  And it is precisely the denial of this support through segregation and discrimination that leaves the most balanced Negro open to anxiety.

  Though caught not only in the tensions arising from his own swift history, but in those conflicts created in modern man by a revolutionary world, he cannot participate fully in the therapy which the white American achieves through patriotic ceremonies and by identifying himself with American wealth and power. Instead, he is thrown back upon his own “slum-shocked” institutions.

  But these, like his folk personality, are caught in a process of chaotic change. His family disintegrates, his church splinters; his folk wisdom is discarded in the mistaken notion that it in no way applies to urban living; and his formal education (never really his own) provides him with neither scientific description nor rounded philosophical interpretation of the profound forces that are transforming his total being. Yet even his art is transformed; the lyrical ritual elements of folk jazz—that artistic projection of the only real individuality possible for him in the South, that embodiment of a superior democracy in which each individual cultivated his uniqueness and yet did not clash with his neighbors—have given way to the near-themeless technical virtuosity of bebop, a further triumph of technology over humanism. His speech hardens; his movements are geared to the time clock; his diet changes; his sensibilities quicken; and his intelligence expands. But without institutions to give him direction, and lacking a clear explanation of his predicament—the religious ones being inadequate, and those offered by political and labor leaders obviously incomplete and opportunistic—the individual feels that his world and his personality are out of key. The phrase “I’m nowhere” expresses the feeling borne in upon many Negroes that they have no stable, recognized place in society. One’s identity drifts in a capricious reality in which even the most commonly held assumptions are questionable. One “is” literally, but one is nowhere; one wanders dazed in a ghetto maze, a “displaced person” of American democracy.

  And as though all this were not enough of a strain on a people’s sense of the rational, the conditions under which it lives are seized upon as proof of its inferiority. Thus the frustrations of Negro life (many of them the frustrations of all life during this historical moment) permeate the atmosphere of Harlem with a hostility that bombards the individual from so many directions that he is often unable to identify it with any specific object. Some feel it the punishment of some racial or personal guilt and pray to God; others (called “evil Negroes” in Harlem) become enraged with the world. Sometimes it provokes dramatic mass responses.

  And why have these explosive matters—which are now a problem of our foreign policy—been ignored? Because there is an argument in progress between black men and white men as to the true nature of American reality. Following their own interests, whites impose interpretations upon Negro experience that are not only false but, in effect, a denial of Negro humanity. Too weak to shout down these interpretations, Negroes live nevertheless as they have to live, and the concrete conditions of their lives are more real than white men’s arguments.

  An Interview with Malcolm X

  A Candid Conversation with the Militant Major-domo of the Black Muslims

  Playboy, May 1963

  ALEX HALEY

  Within the past five years, the militan
t American Negro has become an increasingly active combatant in the struggle for civil rights. Espousing the goals of unqualified equality and integration, many of these outspoken insurgents have participated in freedom rides and protest marches against their segregationist foes. Today, they face opposition from not one, but two inimical exponents of racism and segregation: the white supremacists and the Black Muslims. A relatively unknown and insignificant radical religious Negro cult until a few years ago, the Muslims have grown into a dedicated, disciplined nationwide movement which runs its own school, publishes its own newspaper, owns stores and restaurants in four major cities, buys broadcast time on 50 radio stations throughout the country, stages mass rallies attended by partisan crowds of 10,000 and more, and maintains its own police force of judo-trained athletes called the Fruit of Islam.

  Predicated on the proposition that the black man is morally, spiritually and intellectually superior to the white man, who is called a “devil,” Muslim doctrine dooms him to extermination in an imminent Armageddon—along with Christianity itself, which is denounced as an opiate designed to lull Negroes—with the promise of heaven—into passive acceptance of inferior social status. Amalgamating elements of Christianity and Mohammedanism (both of which officially and unequivocally disown it) and spiked with a black-supremacy version of Hitler’s Aryan racial theories, Muslimism was founded in 1931 by Elijah Poole, a Georgia-born ex–factory worker who today commands unquestioning obedience from thousands of followers as the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, Messenger of Allah. At the right hand of God’s Messenger stands 36-year-old Malcolm Little, a lanky onetime dining-car steward, bootlegger, pimp and dope pusher who left prison in 1952 to heed Muhammad’s message, abandoned his “slave name,” Little, for the symbolic “X” (meaning identity unknown), and took an oath to abstain thereafter from smoking, drinking, gambling, cursing, dancing and sexual promiscuity—as required of every Muslim. The ambitious young man rose swiftly to become the Messenger’s most ardent and erudite disciple, and today wields all but absolute authority over the movement and its membership as Muhammad’s business manager, trouble shooter, prime minister and heir apparent.