What the Negro writer is not saying

I began with an absurdity and a pronouncement from a book called Beyond the melting pot a 1963 book by Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynahan the negro according to these observers of our society is only in America and nothing else. He has no values and culture to guard and protect unquote. That's so sweepingly ignorant conclusion can have been made in 1963 by two relatively sophisticated white social scientists is of course yet another index of how little is known about the American Negro experience by many whites both about its past and about its widely and deeply very gated present. I might also add that this book which was widely lauded for some good reasons in all the reputable places. I didn't see all the reviews but of those I saw not one reviewer argued with Glazer and went ahead on that on that point. The actuality. That the Negro may be only in America and yet also possess a distinctive and in many respects prideful sub

culture or culture. I'm never quite sure about the real semantic difference there. This actuality alludes not only such as Glaeser and more to hand but more damaging Like so many teachers from pre-kindergarten up in black white and schools and are still very few integrated neighborhoods. It's easy enough to moralize on this point. It's also easy to become part of what Ralph Ellison is called that feverish industry dedicated to telling negroes who and what they are. It's an industry. Ellison continues which can usually be counted upon to deprive both humanity and culture of their complexity. What I'm concerned with here however is what those negroes who are aware of the complexity of their humanity and culture tell and have not yet fully told of who and what they are. Obviously the Glazer Moynihan thesis has never had any

correspondence with a Negro American reality whether the reality of Leadbelly Ornette Coleman William to boys or Malcolm X. Maybe Lawrence or Kenneth Clark. Yet the Fishers still exist and the continuing exploration and expression of what it has been and what it is to experience America and to be experienced by it as a Negro. John Oliver Killens tells the readers of The New York Times. My fight is not to be a white man and a black skin but to inject some black blood some black intelligence into the pallid mainstream of American life culturally socially psychologically philosophically. This he says is the truer deeper meaning of the negro revolt which is not yet a revolution to get America ready for the middle of the 20th century which is already magnificently here. A.B. SPELLMAN charges negroes are beating their way into the American middle class implementing its values while sacrificing many of their own.

Ralph Ellison while insisting as he does throughout his work on the pervasive interrelatedness of American Negro culture and the rest of the American grain also emphasizes that we we Negroes haven't had a chance to discover what in our own background is really worth preserving. And James Earl Jones a remarkably penetrating actor asserts there is something behind the black face that has not been told yet. I want people to look at me through my color. Each of these statements and there are scores more particularly from younger writers is linked by an affirmation of the negro experience by a conviction that there are distinctly positive and in some respects by contrast with the pallid mainstream of American culture that there are some enviable elements of what Ellison is called a Negro American style or rather style as the diversity the subtlety and complexity of these styles. Still has to be

underlined because as absurd as the Glazer Moynahan denial of Negro values worth protecting is as absurd as that is the oversimplification. The misunderstanding the distortion of those values. I mean for one example the feverish reality. Of Norman Mailer's apotheosis of the negro hipster who it turns out is only the desperately in Cohen golem in Miller's own dreams in Yiddish a golem in one of its many manifestations as a very obnoxious generally cranky ghost. I mean the kind of neon lit Neo Rousseau ism of $100 misunderstanding. In which a black child whore is presented as the mother wit of us all as John Williams speculated with $100 misunderstanding have been quite so well received had Ketan been a negro social worker.

Instead of a whore. And the inability of man and woman black and white to communicate and put on an altogether different symbolic level. Or I would add if kitten had been any kind of a more complicated sophisticated adult but removed from romanticism zation and removed from the Y years exercises and wish fulfillment. What is the black intelligence skill insights. What are the diverse Negro American styles. What are the counter values. Ellison points to as a reaction to the persistent attempts to exclude and constrict the Negro in America. These attempts we have been shown convincingly did create in many who have simultaneously seen American Life from below from outside and from within a critical objectivity toward majority values. But again what more specifically are the counter values which became a corollary of that critical objectivity. What

is behind the black face that hasn't been told yet. Now clearly these questions have been answered in part by Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker. Moms Mabel Ian Dick Gregory Richard Wright Ralph Ellison Horace Katyn and John Lewis of cynic. Some of Langston Hughes who is not nearly so gentle as he sometimes appears. And by Leroy Jones and many more who have provided some of the answers from their own self definitions and self affirmations. But there is more that has not yet been fully told. Since we're discussing the negro writer in the United States although I think now we're really discussing revolutionary socialism. I'll confine. My further questions to writers among other artists but to writers specifically to begin with questions about the complexity of the humanity and culture of jazz. Only in recent years have we begun to learn something of the marrow of the lives and the communal values

of jazz musicians in the autobiographies of Big Bill Broonzy and Sidney Basheer and such essays as Ralph Ellison's and Charlie Christian and Jimmy Rushing. And the more generalized perspectives of the Roy Jones book Blues people which I think Mr. Ellison of the contrary which I think is the key book to start with if you want to know anything about where jazz really came from which wasn't New Orleans. But there is so much more of jazz and of the pre jazz experience that has not yet been explored. There is no full scale book yet on the blues as poetry. There are some bad books on the blues on something else but not on the blues as poetry on the blues as a way of measuring and reaffirming resiliency and the blues as a way of distilling determination not to be fragmented Ty's by troubles. There's not one novel so far that I know about that has been written from inside the jazz life. There are passages in some books particularly John Williams night people that get close to it but still glancing like

there is hardly any fiction to my knowledge and no plays yet to indicate something of the of the picker reskin jazz Jelly Roll Morton Babs Gonzales the mockingly defiant brilliantly resourceful and yet doomed Demi urges like Lester Young and Fats Navarro. The extraordinarily diversified range of the the singular survivors read Alan and Roy Eldridge Duke Ellington Dizzy Gillespie the loneliest monk the volcanic fiercely complicated rebels Charles Mingus Max Roach. These are all part of the culture our culture the subculture if you want to call that that hardly know anybody knows about it nor of any enough writers yet convincingly searched before and beneath jazz into the microcosm of the folk musicians and the later gospel celebrants to extract something of the various lifestyles endemic to both those disciplines and releases. Again there have been some things but not I think enough. Not that there ever is another. But I mean that what there is is still so fragmentary now in that particular context I remember hearing of a sing

for freedom meeting in an Atlanta church this past May. One of the groups was Bessie Jones on the Sea Island singers some of whose material and stylistic approach and to date the Civil War. Several of the young workers present were distinctly uncomfortable at having that old time down home music superimposed on of this pre-revolutionary present. But one of them a much jailed girl from Birmingham exploded at the ignorance of the other young there. She said I'm tired of going to church and listening to teenagers giggle and laugh on the old songs are sung. I want to know what the old songs are I want to know that my parents were working for 15 cents a day. I want to know what made me. It is not musicological analyses which are basically called for though they needed to but rather rediscover a of the values and counter values of those who did much more than just endure. There are moreover strengths and satisfactions as well as careening challenges and brutal dead

ends in the lives and lifestyles of such later urbanized communal spokesman. As Leroy Carr and Muddy Waters Ray Charles where With few exceptions are there kinds of insights and sustenance in the work of the negro writer in the United States. Many more areas of the only American but distinctly negro experience can. If there is time can it penetrated further detonate deeper shocks of recognition for both whites and blacks in this country. There is no time or maybe no point in cataloguing so many of them here but for one there is a fascinating scan of Negro political action and reaction. Fascinating though sometimes no less dismaying than the intersecting political folkways of the rest of America and by politics I mean much more basic forms of relationships than what happens and does not happen at the polls.

Now much has already been written in this area but so much material in this vein has hardly begun to be ordered into art cauterizing and otherwise from long before the Civil War through reconstruction and truncated populism. What did go wrong there and I think in some ways maybe only creative writers can tell us to Marcus Garvey and the Far from simplistic varieties of black nationalism to the communist era Basques within the ghettos and the present shadow play in the same ghettos of the Trotskyites and the problem how quote progressive is uncool. Elements of the complicated political styles in American Negro relations with each other and with whites have appeared as I said in the works of Negro writers but I expect that much more will be added. To that map of American social history. Of course we know so little about the white man either for that matter. I keep being impressed by questions I hear not not here only but everywhere. I just wonder what goes on in our schools. I just wonder what people learn and where the teachers are taught.

For example among public figures there are the farce and the waste and the skirmishing with tragedy along with the mirror thereby provided of the actual standards of the majority which are variously implicit in the lifestyles of Adam Clayton Powell and William Dawson or a man the fox Jones. And there are the abrasive triumphs leading to accelerating the crucial frustrations of an eighth Philip Randolph or a buyout Ruston. Acutely relevant moreover to present insistence on the need to inject some black intelligence some black non middle class values into American life. Here's a corollary need for more specifics in art as well as in polemics but in art as to just what that intelligence and those values are. If if you do believe there is any real basis for hope and after last night's discussion with Roy I'm not so sure. Not that I ever was. But if you

do believe there is any real basis for hope that basic changes in this country are possible before the whole system becomes dislocated. In that context it can be only facile or merely facile to talk about not wanting to be integrated into a burning house and then to stop there. Those negroes who do not intend at this late date and after this depth of investment to emigrate might might well begin if they have any hope left. And I can understand those who don't. To expend less energy on the rhetoric of contempt and focus instead as Lorraine Hansberry urged recently on rebuilding that house and rebuilding all the way down and up. The contempt is essential both therapeutically and as a way of defining what must be discarded. But just as I'm a lawyer the motion doesn't by itself make a jazzman. So contempt alone does not make a new society. Ralph Ellison in the

process of expressing the vital need for the persistence of a plurality of cultures here. So I'm not sure how much of a plurality we still have except for the negro subculture. Ellison has pointed out much of Negro culture might be negative but there is also much of great value of richness which because it has been secreted by living and has made their lives more meaningful negroes will not willingly disregard what is needed in our country is not an exchange of pathologies Allison says but a change of the basis of society. This is a job which both Negroes and whites must perform together. Although if it ever gets before him the dynamism obviously is going to come from Negroes or in terms of James Baldwin's diagnostic look ahead. There will be a Negro president of this country. But it will not be the country we are sitting in now. That's part of an answer that lady wondered about what happens when people get power. But these declarations are not enough I think.

What changes. How. And tell me not of a neo populist alliance between Negroes and white civil rights actionis and the relatively await fragments of organized labor and the white unemployed. Yes this alliance is the ultimate answer but it's becoming part of the Pietist rhetoric now to just talk about it as if it existed. Because this coalition as of now is a vision but it does not exist. The deepest urgency now has first how to bring what Killen's calls that black intelligence into motivating and stimulating those in the ghetto to organize themselves to create as basic a series of changes in the ways they now live as is possible in local areas. And as this process actually begins if it begins there may then be that dynamism for the other putative elements of that neo populist alliance to emulate. I'm not saying. That the negro writer in the sense as used to be part of the Communist Party philosophy and maybe

still is. I'm not saying that he ought to abandon his primary self expressive and ultimately communal concern. In other words that he abandoned being himself whatever that self is once he finds it in order to become a political block captain or a strategist. But since this is a time and I think it's become so evident in this conference so far since this is a time during which nearly all negro writers feel compelled one way or another to prescribe values for the unfinished revolution they are accordingly somewhat obliged I would think they're obligated to themselves not to anybody else to themselves to follow through with more specifics. If an artist has been driven to the point at which he talks and not only rhetorically of changing the basis of society I expect he might be or feel rather unfulfilled if he were to stop at only the sounding of the alarm. He may well not be able to or be basically interested in drawing up an overwhelming design for a political organization or

for an economic redefinition redefinition of work in a cybernetic society. But he may be able and impelled to go beyond what is becoming a ritualistic flaying of middle class values like the Dwight McDonald telling us the television is terrible. So why would you go from there. I am therefore with a question to a question. Leroy Jones concludes his book Blues people by stating the American Negro is being asked to defend the American system as energetically as the American white man. There is no doubt that the middle class Negro is helping and will continue to help in that defense. But there is perhaps a question mark in the minds of the many poor blacks which is one explanation for the attraction of such groups as the Black Muslims and also a question now in the minds of many young negro intellectuals What is it that they are being asked to say. It is a good question said Leroy Jones and did and America had better come up with an

answer. Well a further question since it is clear and it's been clear in what coruscating said yesterday what Harvey psuedo said with the Roy Jones been saying it seems to me quite clear what it is we are being asked to reject and what can possibly be saved as the basis for a new society. Is the function. And this is what the question is. The function for the future of black intelligence is Killens calls it and the Negro American style as well as Allison refers to it. In what ways can these qualities help to accelerate root changes in societal values as well as in living conditions for the underclass. And how can this be done. Can it be done in a way which will allow those negroes who choose to remain both Negro and American rather than as a happened to most minorities here in the past. Become assimilated out of distinctly communal identity.

I don't doubt that the beginnings of answers exist. I think I've heard some of the blues and jazz as a whole. I think I've experienced some in talking with ghetto youngsters outside their flattening and failure breeding school rooms and I've read segments of dancers in the work of some negro writers both of decades past and now and some of the younger writers such as those in the ROI cited yesterday. But more can be said in this context. I would think with more depth and clarity in so far as present imperatives are concerned how do we go beyond civil rights to a change of the basis of society. What in the Negro American background is both really worth preserving and will also act as a spur to redefining overall American values. There I said yesterday just being black in America is being a non-conformist one uses that nonconformity as a natural

fact of life. But we need to know more about the ways in which that non-conformity to the repressive and repressive majority culture can help to basically radically reshape that culture if it can. If anything can. The inhibition.