The Rising Tide of Colour
By D. W. BROGAN N the great wave of racial bigotry that struck I the United States during and just after the First World War, a vigorous alarmist gave the above title to his ominous sermon on the dangers to American, to Nordic civilisation, of the 'lesser breeds without the law.'
Today, the tide of colour has risen all over the world. The coloured majority of the human race has thrown off the yoke of imperialism, the most populous nation in the world may soon have the atom bomb and the country of Jefferson and Lincoln to many, many millions seems the country of Senator Eastland of Missis- sippi and 'Bull' Connor the Bayard of white supremacy in Birmingham, Alabama. Governor Wallace of Alabama has sworn to die in the breach before he lets a single Negro student enter the state university while a scandalised, or sardonically rejoicing world looks on. No wonder the Attorney-General of the United States calls what are reported to be sterile con- ferences. No wonder Americans, North and South, wait for more bad news from the South. No wonder some fear race riots : no wonder some fear a Sharpeville. The situation is bad; it may be worse. It is already a matter of a revolt; it may soon be a matter of a revolution. I cannot see President Kennedy in the role of Loius XVI, but it may well be that his greatest internal problem is not unemployment but the Negro revolt—and they are connected for un- employment, frustration, despair, are commoner, much commoner among Negroes than among whites. How come? as some Americans put it.
Some of the answers will be found in Mr. Lomax's excellent book.* The lesson is that Negroes are tired of waiting. it is nearly ten years since the Supreme Court ordered school desegregation. 'with all deliberate speed.' (The theory that the Court was quoting The Hound of Heaven is ingenious but baseless.) Only for- mal breaches have been made in school segrega- tion in the states of the locally lamented Con- federacy, and in such centres of enlightenment as Mississippi and Alabama none have been made. It took more than a division' of federal troops to get one Negro student into the Uni- versity of Mississippi; it may take as many to get two students into the University of Alabama.
* THE NEGRO REVOLT. By Louis a Lomax. (1-farnish Hamilton, 21sa And meantime, the Negroes have been acting: acting in sit-downs; acting in 'freedom rides.' And they are turning against the old leadership that played ball with 'liberal' whites. That adroit, if unedifying, politician, the Reverend Adani Clayton Powell, Congressman and boss of Har- lem, is now calling for the expulsion of whites from the NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People). Doubts of white good faith grow and grow, reasonably and unreasonably. The American House is in as great danger of being a House Divided in the centenary year of the Emancipa- tion Proclamation as it was when Lincoln was elected in 1860. The American Negro in the South has contracted out from a society that humiliates him, innocently and deliberately. That some of the studied humiliation is intellectually, if not morally, innocent I can well believe. It may be that not all Southern Negroes are passionately interested in school integration. (Mr. Lomax gives reasons for thinking that this may be so and good reasons why the desperately poor rural Negro doesn't see education as the way out as do his middle-class spokesmen, North and South.) But being a man he objects to the pointless humiliations to which he is subjected.
Every day in the South the Negro is insulted in his human dignity by law and custom. Now he thinks he has had enough. And so he revolts, so far by Gandhian passive resistance. Will his resistance long remain passive, will he accept the leadership of pacific ministers like Martin Luther King? Mr. Lomax has doubts and his discussion of Negro leadership is one of the most valuable parts of his book.
But the most violent explosion may not come in Montgomery or Birmingham but in Washing- ton, within a mile or so of the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials. Why? First of all, Washing- ton is the only large city in the United States with a Negro majority. True, if you count in the 'metropolitan' area in Maryland and Virginia, the whites are in a majority, but in the city of Washington. the 'District,' 50 per cent or the population is black. And the polarisation of prosperous and poor, common to all great American cities, is carried farther in Washing- ton than in any other city known to me. The Negroes are pinned into slum and near-slum areas. Of course they press against these barriers
and some of them give way. The State Depart- ment has desperate trouble finding accommoda- tion for the numerous Negro diplomats in Washington and a current euphemism for living in a district into which Negroes are pressing is to say, 'I live in a diplomatic district.'
The American Negroes, especially the well- educated and professional Negroes, are very conscious of the challenge of the new African nations. A few years ago, American Negroes were leaders of the Negroes of the world, or so they thought. (Didn't Dr. Nkrumah get his education at an American Negro university?) They are not leaders any longer. I remember lunching in the Cosmos Club, the Washington Athenaeum, while I was staying there a few months ago. One of the members was entertain- ing a group of African diplomats, all of them of a degree of blackness almost unknown in the United States. Yet it is only very recently and very reluctantly that the Cosmos Club has admitted even the most distinguished American Negroes.
But it is not exclusion from clubs that worries the Washington Negro. It is exclusion from jobs. Everywhere the Negro is handicapped in his search for jobs and even the better educated Negro settles more or less contentedly for what lie can get (a point on which Mr. Lomax is Illuminating and caustic). But he is worse off in Washington than in most other cities if he wants to escape the traditional menial occupations of his race. For Washington has no industries but government, shops, hotels. A good many Negroes are employed in the lower echelons of the federal government but not many in the higher. So it Is with stores and hotels and the railroads and buses. White taxi-drivers resent Negro drivers and, I believe, not one of the big taxi chains employs Negro drivers. A couple of months ago I dined alone in the Ness Club and was peacefully reading a book by Mr. James Baldwin when the Negro waiter, Yming, slim, spoke to me. 'How do you like Mr. Baldwin's book?' I said I liked it a lot. A day 0..
lwe later, the waiter met me in a corri-
dor and asked. 'Have you finished Mr. Baldwin's book?' I said I had. 'Do you still like it?' I said I did. The waiter's eyes and voice were full of irony as he said 'really?' I was reminded of the speculation with which the highly intelligent Mrs- Chesnut regarded the smiling, deferential slave servants in war-time Richmond a century ago. She thought there was something that boded no good for the Confederacy in the barrier that the smiling slaves put up between themselves and their masters. So I wondered during my two recent visits to Washington. The fault is not all on one side. The last, ugly and unprovoked race riot was started by Negro schoolboys after an 'integrated' game. There is a lot of Negro crime in Washington. A friend of mine was recently 'yoked' (garrotted) outside one of the chief Washington hotels quite early in the evening by a young Negro hoodlum. 1_ the explosion comes, there will be plenty of faults on both sides. But thanks to Southern . leaders like Governor Faubus, Governor Wallace, Governor Barnett, Senator Eastland, Senator Ellender and Senator Byrd (of Virginia), :- the Washington pot boils over, the world will not try to do justice, a sad truth Mr. Dean Rusk (of Georgia) has shown he understands.
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