Notes of a Native Son: "The Harlem Ghetto" and "Journey to Atlanta"

All of Harlem is pervaded by a sense of congestion, rather like the insistent, maddening, claustrophobic pounding in the skull that comes from trying to breathe in a very small room with all the windows shut.

PV’s politics are less murky, to the left of center (the Amsterdam is Republican, a political affiliation that has led it into some strange doubletalk), and its tone, since its inception, has been ever more hopelessly militant, full of warnings, appeals, and open letters to the government—which, to no one’s surprise, are not answered—and the same rather pathetic preoccupation with prominent Negroes and what they are doing.

These cheering sentiments were flanked—or underscored, if you will—by a photograph on the opposite page of an aging Negro farm woman carrying home a bumper crop of onions.

It is the terrible dilemma of the Negro press that, having no other model, it models itself on the white press, attempting to emulate the same effortless, sophisticated tone—a tone its subject matter renders utterly unconvincing.

There is no difference, after all, between the Amsterdam’s handling of a murder on Lenox Avenue and the Daily News’ coverage of a murder on Beekman Hill; nor is there any difference between the chauvinism of the two papers, except that the News is smug and the Amsterdam is desperate.

It is axiomatic that the Negro is religious, which is to say that he stands in fear of the God our ancestors gave us and before whom we all tremble yet.

These churches range from the august and publicized Abyssinian Baptist Church on West 138th Street to resolutely unclassifiable lofts, basements, store-fronts, and even private dwellings.

...include all infidels of white skin who have failed to accept the Savior.

The hymns, the texts, and the most favored legends of the devout Negro are all Old Testament and therefore Jewish in origin: the flight from Egypt, the Hebrew children in the fiery furnace, the terrible jubilee songs of deliverance: Lord, wasn’t that hard trials, great tribulations, I’m bound to leave this land!

The hymns, the texts, and the most favored legends of the devout Negro are all Old Testament and therefore Jewish in origin: the flight from Egypt, the Hebrew children in the fiery furnace, the terrible jubilee songs of deliverance: Lord, wasn’t that hard trials, great tribulations, I’m bound to leave this land!

A Negro learns to gauge precisely what reaction the alien person facing him desires, and he produces it with disarming artlessness.

A Negro learns to gauge precisely what reaction the alien person facing him desires, and he produces it with disarming artlessness.

The tension between Negroes and Jews contains an element not characteristic of Negro-Gentile tension, an element which accounts in some measure for the Negro's tendency to castigate the Jew verbally more often than the Gentile...

...by the nature of his own precarious position, has failed to vindicate this faith.

The structure of the American commonwealth has trapped both these minorities into attitudes of perpetual hostility.

...the Negro is in the even less tenable position of not really daring to trust anyone.

I am not one of the people who believe that oppression imbues a people with wisdom or insight or sweet charity, though the survival of the Negro in this country would simply not have been possible if this bitterness had been all he felt.

This fatalistic indifference is something that drives the optimistic American liberal quite mad; he is prone, in his more exasperated moments, to refer to Negroes as political children, an appellation not entirely just.

Actually, this is not so much political irresponsibility as the product of experience, experience which no amount of education can quite efface.

Sociologists and historians, having the historical perspective in mind, may conclude that we are moving toward ever-greater democracy; but this is beyond the ken of a Negro growing up in any one of this country’s ghettos.

The terrible thing, and here we have an American phenomenon in relief, is the fact that the Negro representative, by virtue of his position, is ever more removed from the people he ostensibly serves.

The rather flippant question on 125th Street now is: “So? You working for Mr. Wallace these days?”

A segment of this army, a quartet called The Melodeers, made a trip to Atlanta under the auspices of the Progressive Party in August, a trip which lasted about eighteen days and which left them with no love for Mr. Wallace.

“The arrangement,” David notes laconically, “sounded very promising, so we decided to go.”

They canvassed for three days, during which time their expenses—$2.25 per man per day—were paid, but during which time they were doing no singing and making no money.

They made more appointments than they were able to keep; partly because the lack of money limited their mobility but also because the Party, discovering these clandestine appointments, moved in, demanding to be heard.

They got into an argument with the manager of the Y, who objected to their rehearsing, and moved to a private home, for which the Party paid 75¢ per man per day; and the Party, which was, one gathers, furiously retrenching, arranged for them to eat at Fraziers’ Café, a Negro establishment on Hunter Street, for $1.25 per man per day.

Eventually, the folksy aspect of the evening was exhausted and the quartet was invited to sing.

Mr. Warde temporized: they could not leave on such short notice; for one thing, the boys had clothes at the cleaners which would not be ready for a while and which they could hardly afford to lose.

Mrs. Price, every aristocratic vein pounding, did not wish to be concerned with such plebeian matters and, finally, losing all patience, commanded Mr. Warde to leave her office: Had he forgotten that he was in Georgia?