The Way We Were III
Collier's Magazine invited Alan Paton, author of "Cry, The Beloved Country" to travel around the USofA and write about the conditions of Black folks the Negro some 50 years ago. He wrote two articles, "The Negro in America Today," about the Negro in the south and “The Negro in the North,” about…well, you get it.
And yes, those links are to the complete text of the articles. Just as interesting is the letters Colliers received in response to the article.
Below the fold is his conclusions. Here's my favorite part:
So in this century it was the Negro, of all Americans, who clarified the principles on which the democracy of America was based. It was he who kept on reminding America what kind of nation she was. It was he who used persistently, as free men should, the power of law and court. But as America could thus thank God for him, so could he thank God for America, that he lived in a country where such things could be, where man was both bound and made free by the law...
And I'm not ducking the original writing. I'm still wrapping my mind around the discovery that Brown v. Board of Education was not the seminal case that established school desegregation.
The big quote:
By now I assume that it is an incontrovertible fact that segregation is dying. The evidence is massive. I take it to be a fact of immense significance that the leaders of Negro action, who can without great error be identified with the NAACP, have set 1963, the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, as the year by which all forms of segregation and discrimination should have been rooted out forever from the life of America.
The President of the United States has stated unequivocally that in the District of Columbia, in all the armed services, and in all areas where federal authority clearly extends, he is fully committed to this same goal.
It must be recorded again that the protagonist in this struggle has been the Negro himself. This is not to belittle the part that has been played by non-Negroes, in the NAACP itself, in churches and Jewish organizations, and in labor unions, by civil liberty leagues, by fighters of every kind.
Yet it seems proven that the burden of this struggle has been borne not by those who fought for others, but by those who fought for themselves. This may seem a melancholy conclusion to some, derogatory to altruism; but it seems to me a sturdy fact of life. I do not think it establishes the inherent moral superiority of the Negro; but it re-establishes that out of adversity great strength is born.
This adversity is now on the decline. Will the great strength stay on, now part of the Negro soul? Or will it waste away? As America accepts the Negro more and more fully, will this strength be poured into herself, so that she can play more surely her role in the world? Will she understand more deeply the problems of Asia and Africa? Of the far future no one can speak, but of the nearer future one can have every hope, as the Negro is more and more admitted to the high offices and the high responsibilities of the republic, and more and more uses the power of his vote. . . .
So in this century it was the Negro, of all Americans, who clarified the principles on which the democracy of America was based. It was he who kept on reminding America what kind of nation she was. It was he who used persistently, as free men should, the power of law and court. But as America could thus thank God for him, so could he thank God for America, that he lived in a country where such things could be, where man was both bound and made free by the law. . . .
The implications of the decision of 1954 are far-reaching. If separate educational facilities are unequal, what enforced separation is not? Segregation is thus seen not through a haze of sophistry and altruistic cant, but through the clear air of common sense, as something indefensible and unjust, even evil. . . .
Many Americans are too pessimistic about their own country; they measure their moral strength in terms of sleeping-tablet consumption, Kinsey reports, juvenile delinquency and McCarthyism. Let them try measuring it as well in terms of the advance of the Negro. Let them try measuring it in terms of justice, which, so often defeated, has a way of conquering in the end.
Perhaps it might be true, after all, that a nation gets the Supreme Court that it deserves.
