The tradition of Negro writing

Of the several assumptions upon which a conference on the negro right here in the United States is based one I think stands out as primary. It is the assumption that there is a distinction between writing by American Negroes and writing by other Americans. It is an old assumption and one that has been accepted almost as a truism. And if it is now possible to call that into question it is not before it has had a still more questionable consequence. It is led to the diversion of writing by Negroes from the main channel of American expressiveness and to the setting it off to change the figure somewhat abruptly as belonging. Like pornography to that class of literary works called curios. The critical treatment of this body of

writing has also been set upon and the standards by which so much of it. Indeed most of it has been judged. I have only rarely been aesthetic and literary. That's questionable and as de troof said if as these consequences the assumption itself has the liberty of course Nigro writing is different because the Negro American is different. The difference stems from the fact of his distinctive group experience in America. The cultural dualism of the American Negro is very real. And nearly all the negro writers of more than local reputation have expressed it in one way or another sometimes unconsciously. As for instance Phillis Wheatley did way back in the 1770s when in

her poetic Epistle to the Earl of dogma she wrote. Should you. My Lord why did you peruse my song wonder from whence my love of freedom sprung whence flow these wishes for the common good by feeling the Hans alone best understood. By young in life by seeming cruel fate was snatched from Africa's fancy happy seat. What pangs excruciating must molest what sorrows laid in my power its breast steeled was that soul and by no misery moved that from a father seized his baby be loved such such my case. And can I then but pray may never feel Tehrani sway. And just as

real and as often expressed also sometimes unconsciously as a psychological dualism. In the autobiographical notes that are the introductory to his first collection of essays notes of a native son James Baldwin is quite explicitly quite aware of both the psychological and cultural dualism. I know he writes that the most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognise that I was a kind of a. Kind of bastard of the West. When I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa. And this meant that in some subtle way in some really profound way I brought to Shakespeare Bach. Rembrandt to the stones of Paris to the cathedral the chalk to the Empire State Building a special attitude. These were not really my creations.

They did not contain my history. I might search in them in vain forever for any reflection of myself. At the same time I had no other heritage. Which I could possibly hope to use I would have to appropriate these white centuries. I would have to make the money. I would have to accept my special I had to my special place in this scheme otherwise I would have no place in any scheme. What was the most difficult was the fact that I was forced to admit something I had always hidden from myself which the American Negro has had to hide from himself as the price of his public progress that I hated and feared white people. This did not mean that I loved black people. On the contrary I despised them.

And I take it also that this dualism is a principle a thematic burden of a group of brilliant essays soon to be published by Ralph Ellison who reminds us that when he began writing in earnest I quote again I was forced to relate myself consciously and imaginatively to my mixed background as American as Negro American and as a negro from what in its own belated way was a pioneer. Background more important and inseparable from this particular effort. It was the necessity of determining my true relationship to that body of American literature through which aided by what I could learn from the literatures of Europe I could find my own voice and to which I was challenged by way of achieving myself to make some small contribution and to whose complete whose composite picture of reality I was

obligated to offer some necessary modifications. I saw a. Measured and psychological sociological and raw cultural terms the distinction in the differences between writing by American Negroes and other Americans are justified. But for all that. It is only the distinction between trunk and branch. The writing of Negroes is fed by the same route sunk in the same cultural soil as writing by white Americans. Nevertheless both academic and popular criticism of exaggerated the distinction into a de column E that has been the source of grave critical injustice to Negro writing. On the one hand and that has until recently at any rate tended to vitiate its effectiveness as an instrument of social and cultural diagnosis and as a body of American experience through

which we are unable to understand the cultural psychology of the American where and I think the whole Western world three times within this century writing by negroes has been done nearly to death once by indifference once by opposition and once by the enthusiasm of its misguided friends. By 9000 No.6 Charles chestnut the best writer of prose the race had produced at that time was virtually silent Dunbar the most popular poet was dead. Booker Washington had published up from slavery but Washington who gave to sass Doris social dimensions to a literary tradition was no writer. Though du boy had written the Souls of Black Folk he had not yet really found an audience. The polemicist propagandist like Monroe

Trotta. Kelly Miller and George Forbes were faint whispers and the lengths some would indifference had stopped the ears of all but the most enlightened liberals who as often as not were derided as nigger lovers. But this indifference that threatened even before the turn of the century it choked off and made the purest stream of Dunbar's a lyricism yearning for the recognition of his talent as it expressed itself in conventional poetry and conventional English. He had to content himself with being represented by what he considered to be a third and fourth rate his literary sponsor William Dean Howells at the time the most influential critic in America passed over done by was versed in pure English with scarcely a glance but went on to say quote that there is a precious difference of temperament between the two races

which it would be a great pity ever to lose and that this is best preserved and most charmingly suggested by Mr. Dunbar. In those pieces of his where he studies the moods and traits of his own race we call these pieces dialect pieces but they're really not dialect so much as delightful personal attempts and failures for the written and spoken language. In nothingness Mr Dunbar's aren't so well known as in these pieces which describe the range between appetite and emotion which is the range of the rights he reveals in these a finely ironic perception of the negroes and limitation. I should say perhaps that it was this humorous quality which Mr Dunbar had added to our literature and it would be this which would most distinguish him now and hereafter.

Dunbar's non dialect verses appeared more or less on sufferance. The very format of lyrics of the hot side the book in which most of his non dialect pieces appear it suggests this. No fancy finding no fine paper no charming photograph such as one finds in his other books lyrics of the hearth side was the least publicized of all his works and four lines from his Pauline the poet tells why he signs of love when Earth was young and love itself was in his lays but Osmo world it turned to praise a jingle in a broken tongue. The indifference was due to the fact the poetry written in pure English by a negro contradicted the negro stereotypes which were effective in

Americus thinking about the negro. According to them the negro was either and sometimes both at the same time a buffoon a minstrel and a harmless child of nature or an irresponsible beast of definitely cunning soul lists and depraved and either case the negro was a species of creature that was not quite. Mad. The influence of these concepts upon writing by American Negroes and of course upon writing about American Negro race had been and continues to be really tremendous. Sterling Brown one of the more searching scholars had this to say as late as 1940 to quote the market for Negro writers then is definitely limited. And the more truthfully we write

about ourselves the more limited the market. Those novels about Negroes that sell best touch very lightly upon the realities of Negro life. Books that make our black ghettos in big cities seem very happy places indeed. Eileen Locke complained that the negro was quote a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly an innocent sentimentalism partly an deliberate reactionism the negro himself. Locke wrote has contributed his share to this through a sort of protective social mimicry forced upon him through the adverse circumstances of dependence through having had to appeal from the unjust stereotypes of his oppressors and producers to those of his liberators friends and benefactors. He has had to subscribe to traditional positions from which his case has been

viewed. That the stereotypes were powerful there can be no doubt and the negro writer reacted to them in one of two ways. Either he bowed to them and produced work that would do them no violence and offer them no contradiction or he went to the opposite extreme and wrote for the purpose of correcting nor denying the stereotypes done Bob did the former. Not only his dialect poetry but his short stories depicted negroes as folksy not too bright so all of whose concerns are minor and all of whose problems can be solved by the emotional and spiritual equivalence of sticks of red peppermint candy. Charles testiness experience was both confounding Leon like and strikingly similar to Dunbar was when his stories began appearing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1887.

It was not generally known that chestnut was in the GRO. The editor of The Atlantic Walter Hines page theory in that revealing the author's race would do harm to the reception of the author's work kept his race a closely guarded secret for a decade. It was this same fear that led to the initial rejection of chestnuts first novel The house behind the cedars and they publication in its stead of a collection of the stories that had appeared in The Atlantic. At that time chesnut wrote some years after Woods. A literary work by an American of acknowledged was a doubtful experiment both for the writer. And the publisher. Entirely apart from its intrinsic merit. Indeed my race was never mentioned by the publishers in announcing or advertising the book of short stories chestnuts later books published after his race became known were doomed to

failure so far as reception and sails were concerned. Also. On another account they were honest. They probed the problem of rice. They overrode the concepts and contradicted the stereotypes that supported the full dialect tradition. The indifference to the work of culture conscious race conscious negro writer seeking honest answers to real questions began to crystallize into opposition in the first decade of this century. It was opposition to the negro's ambitions. It was opposition to the negro writer who was honest and sincere. But let me not too much oversimplify a complex matter. Even with the advantage of hindsight it is hard to distinguish cause from effect. In 19 0 2 a white

minister named Thomas Dixon published a novel called The leopard's spots. The purpose of which was as some of the advertising copy declared to tell the story of the races in the south. The True Story of the races in the south. Three years later the same author published the Klansmen from which exactly ten years later the infamous moving picture of the birth of a nation was made. Both Dixon's novels were vicious libels of the Negro people and both were great commercial successes. In 1930 there was a race riot in New York in 19 for Thomas Nelson Page published his canonical book on race relations called The Negro. The Southerners problem in 1960 were race riots in Georgia and Texas by 19 07 practically all the southern states that made color cast legal in

1008 the bloodiest of riots occurred in Springfield Illinois and probably the most cogent fact of all. Booker Washington had been chosen by white people as the Negro leader. He had risen to that eminence by preaching a way of life strictly in conformity to the prevailing concept. The folk dialect tradition which without any important modifications whatever. Embrace the stereotype of the negro as a contented peasant a docile IOL menial under the stern but not unkindly of a white boss. A creature who had a place knew it and would certainly keep it unless he got bad notions from somewhere. The laughable. And or dangerous school was also the farmhand in the city dwelling laborer who could be exploited for his own good in the greater glory of white man. The condition of in

theory a superior race and caste could be maintained to everlasting. What this meant to the negro intellectual The Negro Artist and writer was that he must stick with the old forms and stereotypes and work with in the old folk dialect tradition if he wished an audience. It meant that he must do this or that he must deny his racial kinship all together and leave unsounded the profoundest depths of the peculiar experiences his need groundless. A few chose the first course and said Julius Lee imitated Don. Down through the second decade of this century when more skillful quite writers Octavius Roy Cohen Gilmore Millan and then a different kind of way and with a different intent. Karl van backed and DuBose Haywood took it up. And gave it a Styria solidity that has

lasted almost to this time. But their motives differed. Other negro writers I beg your pardon. Other negro writers chose the second course a kind of apostasy but their motives differed from those of the first group and their ambitions were more steeply pitched. As Herbert Hilla said in another context they sought quote to break through the limits of racial parochialism into the whole range of contemporary matters that engage the interest of an enlightened and sophisticated public. Which public of course was white. I hope it is clear that until very recently there was no Negro audience. Moreover. The negro writer has felt that winning a white audience was the only adequate test of his talent and of his aesthetic standards and that only the

judgment of a white audience had meaning. But there's another factor here too and it is perhaps of equal importance. The negro writer has felt it to be a kind of racial duty to attract a white audience. Until lately when he has tried to do this in terms of his own integrity and on the basis of the most honest exploration of the negro experience of which he is capable he has failed of his objective in the first two decades of this century apostasy ceding to some Nigro writers. The only way of escaping complete frustration. But if we take the widow of Paul Dunbar. As fairly typical of the ease then there was a subtle kind of madness in it. Born in New Orleans married to a famous dialect elite. Later a teacher in a negro high school living all her

life in a negro get on all her ambitions and aspirations and evidently conditioned by the inescapable fact of her negro ness. And yet none of this finding expression in what she wrote and all of what she wrote ignoring her racial and social heritage. That's mad. Until our own time when it has been followed with great popular success by such writers as Willard motley Frank Yerby and WILL THOMAS The whole tradition had pathological overtones and the typical issue of this psychopath the illiterati area is naturally precious arty self-conscious and except as a symptom empty of all meaning of all sense. Indeed quite silly as in a piece of Braithwaite's called ironic El-Al Davy.

There are no hollows anymore between the mountains the prairie floor is like the curtain with the drape of the winds invisible shape and nowhere seeded and nowhere heard the seas quiet as a sleeping bird. Now we're tracking. What holds back a rifle in the very track where the earch put forth. So we study and move a thousand miles a day. Time's a fancy ringing bells whose meaning charlatan history tells us. The writers in this nonracial a static tradition were all touched by absurdity. It is not strange to learn of one of them learned of one of them setting out to write a novel composed entirely of elliptical sentences though some of them developed an amazing virtuosity they were definitely as the say goes off.

Meantime. Excuse me. Meantime the insurgency was developing in the upper ranks of Negroes. They were beginning to rebel against Booker Washington and his ideas. What had happened was that Washington with the help of the historic situation in the old concepts had so thoroughly seduced the minds of white people. The minds of those like people who made up the power structure and who profess themselves kindly disposed in the groves that they were his entirely doctored Deputy be deployed tells the story in dusk of dawn the titan of Tusky controlled so far as Negroes were concerned. Practically all the avenues of communication and its control was despotic editors of influential journals and great publishing houses submitted Nigro manuscripts to Washington's judgment and rejected those that Washington told them to reject. Led

by Dubois the insurgents had no attention getting voice first. It is true that the Chicago Defender was founded in 1900 and Monroe trotters Boston Guardian in one thousand one. And that they were shrill and brave organs. But neither Abbott nor Trotta the attitudes had grown into full effectiveness. Neither indeed had to boy. But he was growing fast. In 1903 he published the Souls of Black Folk which contained among other things the essay of Mr. Booker T Washington and others sharply criticizing the man from Tuskegee and which drew down on Dubois had Southern white charges of his be quote a preferred of our customs and enemy to the established order. And a threat to the existing good relations between the races. In 1911 the first issue of the Crisis magazine appeared. It was much more than the

official organ of the NAACP. It was a platform for the expression of all sorts of opinions and ideas that ran counter to the old notion of Negro inferiority. I believe in God do boy had once written who made of one blood all nations that on Earth do dwell. I believe that all men black brown and white are brothers varying through time and opportunity in form and gifting feature but differing in no essential particular and delight consoled in the possibility of infinite development. I believe in pride of race and we need self this conviction conviction to boy never last month by month in that section of the crisis called opinion. He scored against reaction month by month. The magazine cited the significant achievements of negroes in fields apart from the two which so many

millions of people thought negroes belonged year by year it listed the outstanding Negro college graduates. It was an organ of expression for those negroes who were tired of the diet of the folk dialect tradition and apostasy. And for that handful of liberal whites who were ashamed. There were stories and poems by Fenton Johnson articles by Benjamin Brawley Oz Well garrisoned the lot and Kelly Miller and there were always those editorials by Dubois. Though polemics and propaganda were by far the greater Ponton the more important part. There were other things in the crisis as well historical essays by authors Schaumberg literary pieces by Benjamin Brawley a department of books conducted by Jesse Fawcett poing by Leslie Pinckney Hill in Georgia Douglas Johnson. But the point about the polemic is this. Accepting such liberal and non popular

journals as the Atlantic Monthly and world's work and the two or three Negro newspapers that had not been bought or throttled by the clique at Tuskegee. The crisis was the only voice the negro had the opposition to the uttered message of that voice was tremendously organized around Booker Washington and his philosophy. And there is no doubt that Booker Washington would have smothered voice if he could. It is impossible actually to measure one effect of this opposition upon writing by American Negroes. How many Negro writers of promise were discouraged and even defeated by you. There is no way to tell. But the number of Negro writers who turn to race denial is probably even larger than that already indicated. Nevertheless bit by bit protestation and revolt were

becoming more powerful reagents in the social chemistry that suddenly it seemed produced the new Negro year by year more and more Negroes were transformed by it and a lot of negroes needed transforming. Once James Weldon Johnson himself had been content to sing God of our weary years God of our silent tears thou who has brought us thus far on our way thou who hast baaing might lead us into the light. Keep us ever in the path we pray shadowed beneath by high and may we forever. True to our God true to our native line. Lift Every Voice and Sing is beautiful with the soft beauty of humility and supplication. It was written in 1900 and it had the high approval of Booker T Washington then followed Johnson's period of apostasy and such actually undistinguished

undistinguishable things of his eyes the glory of the day was in her face. My city the White Witch and a score of similar poems but in 1912 when he was already forty one years old he wrote the novel The Autobiography of the next colored man and by 1917 he could cry out bitterly. Then should we speak but serve while words. Or shall we hang our heads in shame. Stand back of new come foreign hoard some fear our heritage to claim no standing erect and without fear. And for our foes let this suffice. We have bought a rightful kinship here and we have more than paid the price. The new Negro was only apparently a phoenix like springing reborn from the ashes of his degradation.

Other factors than simple protest too ponderous for elaboration here contributed to his Genesis in the first place is Eileen Locke says much of the general notion which was not so much notion this mindset of the old negro was based on myth. The war sloughed off some of the emotional and intellectual secretions that swallowed him around and he stood partially revealed for what he was a fellow whose opportunities had been ours by historical fallacies. A creature of morrow the bait a something to be argued about condemned or defended to be kept down or in his place a social buggy or a social burden. But with all they mind pretty much as other men were. By 1916 the war which made him an intersectional migrant proved that he too saw greater freedom more economic opportunities the stability of education the protection of laws even handedly administered the enlargement of

democracy. He too was a seeker after the realities in the American dream. But when in 1917 he was called upon to protect that dream with his blood when he was asked to help make the world safe for democracy. Something else happened to reveal the negro more fully. He started asking questions and demanding and says it was only natural. Who's democracy. He wanted to know and why and where for. There followed the promises which were certainly sincerely meant in the stress of the times. Then came the actual fighting and dying. Then peace. Then in 1999 after the riots in the nation's capital in Chicago in just to put Pennsylvania in the sing Louis. By this time the new Negro movement with W e be do boy Al Ain luck Walter White James Weldon Johnson etc. at it's head was already

moving massively and more than the students of social phenomena were aware of it. The race clashes focus the popular attention upon America's largest minority in 1919 appeared that sonnet of Claude McKay's which is sometimes said to mark the more conscious beginning of the movement in its emotional terms as if we must die let it not be like hogs hunted and penned in an inglorious spot. While around us barked the mad and hungry dogs making their mark get our curse and lot. If we must die. Oh let us Nobili die so that our precious blood may not be shed in vain. Then even the monsters we defy shall be constrained to honor us the dead kinsmen. We must meet the common foe though far outnumbered Let us show us brave run for their thousand blows deal one death. What the hell before

us lies the open ground like men we'll face the murderous cowardly pack pressed to the wall died but fighting back. In that same year 1990 negro's made a crack in the wall of prejudice that had largely confined them to clear roads on Broadway. Shortly thereafter shuffle along was a sparkling quote all negro musical of unusual zest and talent. The gardening movement was attracting great attention in one thousand twenty came two boys dark water Charles Gilpin's portrayal of O'Neill's Brutus Jones was called the dramatic triumph of 1921 James Weldon Johnson gave the movement fresh the liberty by publishing an anthology of Negro poetry and broadly published a social history of the American Negro. Carter G Woodson began his monumental studies of the Negro in history at about this time a

little before this time really there is confusion the gift of black folk a remarkable first book of poetry colored by con take column fire in the Flint. The wiry blues God's trombones the walls of Jericho home to Harlem had all been published read discussed praised and damned by 1928. Fortunately. Some of the talents that produce these works with genuine talents all of them were interesting had this not been so the new Negro movement in art and literature would surely have come to nothing. The best poetry of McKay Johnson Hughes von tome column the early short stories of Rudolph Fisher the best prose of do boy would have lived without the help of the movement but without the movement. The work of a great many of us would have attracted no attention whatever. It must be appreciated too that the interest of Negro material in negro art expression was considerably furthered by white

writers and critics. Indeed the new Negro movement had to find scope outside the race or it would have smothered in its own cocoon. Whatever else Eugene O'Neill Karl Van de And Karl van backed and did. And Julia Peter can did they gave artistic sanction to the use of Negro material for other. Purposes than burlesque. But. The second phase. Writing by Negroes beginning with this period and continuing into the early 30s had do distinct faces which combine to mark the start of a psychological and artistic development that is now come to complete realisation. The first of these phases was experimental and it was a reflection of what was happening in all of American literature of TS Eliot of what was happening in the poetry of TS Eliot and to eat Cummings of what spaces Anderson and Hemingway were doing in prose

of what Maxwell Anderson and Eugene O'Neill were doing in drama that negro writers could now afford to be touched by these influences. Was it was itself a good sign. But the second phase is the one that is best remembered. One searches in vain for a term to characterize it and for the exact impulses behind it it was chock full of many contradictory things. It showed itself naive in sophisticated elemental an overwrought hysterical and frivolous and worthwhile joyously free and yet hopelessly enslaved. It is simple enough to attribute this to the effects of the just ended war which were many and deep. But the age of this tick release at this time of certain aberrant tendency tendencies in writing by Negroes can nowhere be matched in contemporary literature. It seemed to have been it once a period of catharsis and of attention

it produced the poignant simple beauty of Johnson's the creation and that the pressing futility of Thurman's The Blacker the Berry. In the same period Claude McKay could write the wholesome pick arrest banjo and the utterly inexcusably cheap banana bought the same Hughes who wrote I've known rivers and mother to son could also find satisfaction in creating the rather bizarre the cap and the saxophone. White America fastened upon the bizarre the exotic and the Ate of this stick elements of the second phase and turned them into a commercialized fad. Anyone who examines even in a cursory fashion the social history of the 20s is immediately struck. By the influence of hard the social and literary history of the 20s is immediately struck by the influence of Harlem upon it. That Harlem was largely synthetic

did not seem to matter in Harlem. The well advertised belief was ganti was king. The revolt is from salt Senta in Winesburg Ohio and Main Street from all the villages found carnival in Harlem life. The dithyrambic said had certain sweet their freedom and honest Savitri hear it out music. Jungle night hear that music and the moon was quite. Jungle Love A. Night. Black Boy 2 with Gates the moon and the moon was jawing the moon was also made of crepe paper. So this is was the commercial angle that Negroes represented as be the very gods and goddesses of unrestrained joy who largely had no money anyway could not. That is they were not permitted to enter the best Negro nightclub in the world.

Commercialism was the bane of the negro run as a renaissance of the 20s jazz music for instance became no longer the uninhibited expression of an learned music makers but a highly sophisticated and stylized pattern of musical sounds. The Charleston the black bottom the Lindy Hop went down to Broadway and Park Avenue and were taught and often Mary's dancing skills from being an authentic form of the blues became the torch song. Popularized by Ruth Etting and Helen Morgan. The stuff in which negro writers were working and passed into the less sincere minds of white writers and Negro writers themselves from a high pitch of creation fell relatively and pathetically silent. Three times within this century writing by American Negroes has been done nearly to death.

And yet today it is in excellent state of health. When Richard writes Uncle Tom's Children was published in 1938 only the least aware did not realize that a powerful new pen was employing itself in store and in terrible material. Then when native son appeared in one thousand forty in even the least aware realized it in the first book a collection of short stories of the length of novelettes. If the first book a collection of short stories of the length of novelettes is a clinical study of the human mind under the stress of violence and then native son is an equally clinical study of the Social be under the cumulative effects of organized repression. The two books complement each other. The theme of both is prejudice pre-judgement. If one needs that expanded a little to make it crystal clear The theme is as Wright himself said the effects of prejudice upon the human

personality. For what Richard Wright deals with mainly is only incidentally and for dramatic purposes and because of the authenticity of empiricism Negro and white what he deals with this prejudice and he tells us Bigger Thomas was not black all the time. He was white too. And there were literally millions of him everywhere. More than anything else as a writer I was fascinated by the similarity of the emotional tensions of bigger in America and bigger in Nazi Germany and bigger in all Russia all Bigger Thomas is white and black felt tense afraid nervous hysterical and restless. Certain modern experiences were creating types of personalities whose existence ignored racial and national lines of demarcation. These personalities carried with them a more universal drama element than anything I'd ever encountered before and these personalities were mainly consequent upon men and women living in a world whose fundamental

assumptions could no longer be taken for granted. Because it was not in the truest sense particular and confine because it was in a sense universal. The stuff in which Wright employs his employed his pen was stern and terrible. Some critics have said that the wide appeal of Wright's work is due to the sensational sensationalism in it. But it is not this black boy which does a black boy which does not prove the point except Verio bleakly does not deny it either. Of course this latter book is autobiographical which excuses it from the same kind of analysis that can be brought to bear upon the works of pure creation. But even here it may be argued not to in Congress Lee that right depicts delineates and skewers home the point.

That to live a bitch really as this a period among inferiors or the other way around. Be disappearing already intellectual or economic is a temptation and hubris inevitably deteriorating and that let it be a very has nothing to do with the its extrinsic particulars of race. It has an application as universal as power corrupts. So Richard Wright was a new kind of writer in the ranks of Negro writers. He had extricated himself from the dilemma of the horns of which where to write exclusively for a negro audience of which there was none and thereby limit oneself to a mano typical and glorified picture of Negro life and to to write exclusively for a white audience and thereby be trucked in the old stereotypes the fixed opinions the stop situations that are as blue arcs against honest creation. Negro writers traditionally have been impaled upon one or the other who warn of this dilemma. Sometimes in spite of all their

efforts to avoid it. Langston Hughes. It was undoubtedly sincere when he declared of young negro writers back in the 20s quote If white people are pleased we are glad if they are. It doesn't matter. If colored people are pleased we are glad if they are not their displeasure doesn't matter either. He was sincere but he was mistaken for a writer writes for an audience. Consciously or unconsciously he bears in mind the real or imagined BQ realities of the audience to whom he wishes to appeal. Until very recent years nigra writers have not believed that a white audience and a colored audience were essentially alike because in fact they have not been essentially alike. They have been kept apart by a wide socio cultural gulf. By differences of concept by deliberately cultivated fears to Buddhists ignorants and race and caste consciousness. Now that Gulf is closed.

The hope which James Weldon Johnson expressed many years ago is being fulfilled at last. Standing on his racial foundation the negro author can create that which rises above race and reaches up to the universal in truth and beauty. When Dylan Brooks in her poetry does this writes poetry that appeals to all humanity no longer fearing the ancient interdiction Chester hauling in if he hollers let him go. Writes forcefully even if somewhat irrelevantly of the sexual attraction a white woman feels for a negro man. And William out away and let me breathe funda concerns himself almost entirely with white characters. On the purely romantic and escapist side Frank Yerby can write the foxes of HOWER and a million other books. I am. Though what is happening seems very like a miracle. It has been a long

time preparing writing by American Negroes has never been such a in such a splendid state of health. Nor with such a bright didn't shining future before it would lead was.