THE HARLEM REPORTER
By WILSON JEFFERSON*
THE reporter who spends a, few days in the Harlem section of New York City can at best get only a surface estimate of its inhabitants. The negro is a member of the most diversely constituted group in America. Many negro families have more than one hundred and fifty years of freedom behind them. The environment of others has been so oppressive that, in their thinking, they are still slaves. Add the influence of a generous admixture of white blood, and the extraneous pressure of an unrelenting white prejudice, and you will have a fairly adequate picture of the negro in Harlem and elsewhere in the United States.
But the Harlem reporter seldom has the time to examine these and the many lesser factors which help to make the black man's mere existence such a trying problem. He will be handicapped in the beginning by the fact that it is easier to get into a Park Avenue mansion than it is to enter the home of the average middle-class negro family. This suspicion of the stranger is not without a justifiable basis in the black man's experience. White men never visit him for any good purpose ; reporters never question him except to make fun of him.
The enterprising reporter, however, will easily be able to meet and question a few semi-public characters. Among them will be the moderately successful negro business man, the trained professional man, and the shrewd if not cultured individual who has had some success in the entertainment field.
The negro who has achieved a degree of material wealth will talk generalities, and, following small-time business instincts, he ,will struggle not to give away any secrets. When the reporter meets a negro of some training and culture there is a slightly different story to tell. It is an offence in the opinion of the questioner if this educated black man makes the suggestion that the reporter should spend a year rather than ten days in gathering all the material he professes to be seeking. Then when the negro tries to show him how futile it is to label traits black or white on the basis of a superficial investigation, or how dangerous it is to mistake the results of training and opportunity for innate superiority, the breach between them widens, and the reporter puts his hand on the door knob. As he bows himself out he chuckles inwardly over what he is going to do to that same negro later on when his penetrating study * Mr. Jefferson is himself a negro. begins to take form ; and he resolves henceforth to see Harlem with his own eyes and to interpret it out of the depths of his own wisdom.
Thus our reporter visits Harlem's night clubs ; he gets a peep, under suspicious circumstances, into a few poorer class homes ; he asks the ignorant negro of the street unfair questions about sex and rum and gambling. Later he tops it all off with a visit to a magistrate's court, or to one of the more formal criminal courts. Still later, from the Nordic calm of his fiftieth storey hotel room (where perhaps at the time live more than a score of unmarried white couples), he sends back home a highly-coloured, ebullient account of the irresponsible negro.
What our reporter forgets is that Harlem, in spite of many reams of paper to the contrary, is a ghetto where a great many black people live because they are unable to live any- where else in New York. They do not flock there because of any exotic, darkly mysterious drawing-power. A majority find life there empty, exacting and filled with unmerited misfortune. They do not return to Georgia or Alabama because they realise that although cramped and circum- scribed, and often jobless out of sheer prejudice, they still can maintain within its limits an independence and a feeling of freedom and security which are entirely absent in their former southern homes.
The widely advertised criminality of the Harlem dweller is mainly a myth, but it, too, gains credence because it is generally given the semblance, of truth. In Harlem and elsewhere the negro is not more criminal than the white man—the criminal in his group is simply easier to catch. Crime statistics, the kind the reporter quotes, never take in the army of white criminals who keep their freedom through their wits and their connexions. The latter always carefully plot their crimes, and plan, in advance, their escape. About 8o per cent. of all crimes committed by negroes are unpremeditated, and, from the transgressor's standpoint, almost always unsuccessful. Put briefly, there is no way as yet to compare the smart white criminals who ought to be in gaol with the poor dumb negroes who are already there.
Perhaps the most valid complaint the sensible negro has to make against the fly-by-night reporter is the tendency (sometimes it is almost an obsession) to generalise about a whole race from the examples of a few thugs and reprobates. Even the most inexperienced gatherer of news should be able to realise that colour is an unforgettable badge of race. White thugs, like the razor-toting gangs of Glasgow whom I read about in a recent issue of The Spectator, are never able to besmirch the reputations of their poor but respectable neighbours. But the memory of a few bad black men lingers on and on, to hamper and incriminate a whole race : a white criminal being remembered only as another bad character, while the black one is remembered as belonging to a particular group.
In population figures Harlem represents only a small part of the total number of negroes in the United States. But the Harlems of Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland and a half-dozen other large northern cities, includ- ing New York, do contain about one-sixth of the total number of negroes in the country. These ghettos of the North, with all of their bad features, still offer a kind of haven to the oppressed negro of the South, because they are at least lynch proof, and, in some respects, prejudice proof. If in time these circumscribed areas do bring about a binding race-consciousness and outlook, then those reporters who often travel thousands of miles to visit us will really have something to engage their prolific pens. For many of them will then see some kind of menace in this new solidarity, and begin to advocate some unfeasible and unfeeling plan of deportation or disintegration.
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