Why so many of our so-called leaders spend so much time and energy hunting up “friends of the Negro” is more than I can understand in this day and age. It is self-evident that these persons who talk so loudly and so much about rights and things like that have no appreciation of their present status. They have not yet conceived of themselves nor the mass of Negroes as American citizens, with the same responsibilities towards the nation as others here. To them, Negroes are still wards of the nation, to be done for, but with no responsibilities for the welfare of the United States. We are just here like tourists. Therefore, it is not up to us to fight for able, impartial executives, legislators and jurists. We get carried away by anybody who comes along and claims to be a “friend of the Negro.”

  Like voracious bluefish swarming around a school of menhaden, this type of politician has been fattening off of us since 1865, and most of them have done very well for themselves by their insincerity and our credulity. But even so, these political craftsmen cannot claim credit for originality. This “taking the heathen” gambit is only a variation of the old missionary game. For nearly three hundred years the English boasted that the flag followed the missionary. The routine is, finding the competition too keen among your own kind, you fit out a clipper and set sail for the “heathen.” Appoint yourself his pitying partisan until you can land enough force to take him. Variations of this racket have been worked out and succeeded all over the world, even right here in these United States. Sell dope to the heathen. The dope may be beads, lengths of calico, whiskey, opium, friendship, or some other stupefying stuff. It is a good way to make a big man out of yourself in a hurry. The old game is still good as long as you can buy their votes for two dollars and put them to single-shotting.

  But no fairly intelligent Negro has any right to be deceived by any political “friend” who offers to buy his vote. The fact that he offers to buy it tells you what he thinks about your character, and the petty amount gives you his estimate of your intelligence. Lumped together, you are two dollars worth of integrity and brains.

  Nor need the Negro leaders of the vote-selling, single-shotting Negro electorate hope for legislation in our favor. They do not seem to realize that when the candidate has paid them off at the polls, he has no further obligations. Nor has he any cause to wish to further our interests out of respect. Under our Constitution, there is no royal ruler. That quality is distributed among the citizens of the United States. Every American is part of the king that rules over this nation. To sell your vote is to abdicate your part of the throne, and that is that.

  And how can the Negro leaders who hailed these outside organizers so loudly, and the voters who so slavishly followed their counsel, reconcile their “friendship” with the fact that they neglected the twelve-and-a-half-million-dollar school bond issue at the polls? A generous slice of this was earmarked for the improvement of Negro schools in Dade County. If these organizers had really been our friends, they would have stressed the improvement of Negro schools over the senatorial race. But this was certainly not the case. I sampled 164 voters as they left the polls and asked if they had voted for the Bond Issue. Many of them behaved as if they were hearing about it for the first time. Thirteen stopped and told me that they had voted for it. Two of the others told me that it was not important. What they needed to do was to get the right man in the Senate. That school business could be looked after later on. What can be clearer proof that, no matter what they said about being “friends of the Negro,” it was not true. The Negro vote was thought necessary to elect the candidate they were here to put over, and that was all.

  Negro participation in the southern primaries has only just now been restored after generations of being outlawed. So the Smathers-Pepper race is, or was, of the greatest importance for Negroes. It does not gain its significance for us and the nation half so much from what the candidates said about Negroes, and how they said it, as from our own concept of the value of the franchise as expressed by our behavior at the polls. Evaluations of Negroes as participating citizens are certainly being made. Serious and analytical minds will search out whether we see it as our responsibility to serve the common good by supporting men of high caliber for important offices, or whether, ignoring such qualifications, we rally around the “good masters” from the Negro point of view. That will determine whether we are slave-minded mobs or reliable citizens.

  One very successful professional Negro man observed, “This FEPC is not the big bonus that our people are taking it to be. In the first place, it is unworkable, and if it could be made to work, it would be a two-edged sword. These Negroes don’t seem to realize that. If it could be enforced, what would hinder white office workers, insurance agents and executives, morticians and the like, from penetrating Negro business and throwing thousands of us now gainfully employed out of work? Don’t fool yourself that none of them wouldn’t do it if there is a good living to be made at it, and there is. White teachers could then man our schoolrooms. We had better learn to think before we yell so much.”

  “Man!” a pastor of a large Baptist church shouted. “You’ve got something there. You’ve got cold chills running up and down my back. Supposing this law passed and a white preacher who has been struggling along for years with a little charge of around a hundred members made up his mind to take over my five-thousand-members-church! And that mob is out there single-shotting for him right now. I’m watching out for these ‘friends of the Negro’ from now on.”

  Whatever the issues might be at any given time, it is certainly high time that the Negro voter took his responsibility seriously. It is time for us to cease to be the single-shotting herd. Let us vote our heads instead of our hats and shirts. Each voter approaching the polls fired by his own well-considered convictions and performing this most sacred civil duty in the way that it was intended. It is time for us to cease to allow ourselves to be delivered as a mob by persuasive “friends” and become individual citizens. In other words, turn our backs upon the concepts of the Reconstruction and not keep turning back the clock. To take a look at the calendar and read it right. Find out that this is the Year of our Lord 1950, and not 1865.

  THE END

  Mourner’s Bench

  Why the Negro Won’t Buy Communism

  The American communist party held a convention in New York recently. Henry Winston, a Negro, and organizational secretary, got up and fervently preached a crusade to sweep the American Negro into the party wholesale.1

  Then in recent days our attention is called to The Peace Information Center and its Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, a Negro, indicted by the Dept. of Justice, and now changed into the American Peace Crusade, called the most important pro-Soviet offensive in America.2

  This dove-tails right in with other observations. The experts who watch communist strategy point out that the reds are now beginning a rather important drive to build up their Negro membership. They give two reasons for this. First, the commies hope to lump the American Negro in with all the other colored peoples of the world, so that we will feel that if we fight against the North Koreans, or Mao’s hordes, we will be acting against our own best interest. That all colored people of the world must hang together against the whites.

  Second stanza: Since Negroes, like all other workers, will be increasingly important in [the] defense industry, the communists hope and pray to use us to do their dirty work in the way of sabotage and espionage. It can easily be seen that they do not think very highly of us and our character by that.

  So, the current party line is to muss us up in every way. Even to observing Negro History Week. If, as and when the eleven red leaders go on to jail, it is reported that four Negroes will be among those who will succeed them. Not long ago, Howard Fast had to eat crow for four columns in the Daily Worker.3 It seems that he had made a slighting remark about Lt. Gilbert, the Negro who was found guilty by court-martial in Korea.4 Fast had said that Gilbert had no business to be fighting in Korea in the first place, but for fear that might frighten off some Negroes, even that much was counter to the new party line. So he had to beat his breast resoundingly and whine that he was guilty of “white chauvinism.” The American Negro’s feelings simply must not be hurt-ed.

  This present hassling over the American Negro is just some more of an old soup-bone warmed over. Common meter, Brother Peter. It has been around twenty-five years since certain Negroes of my acquaintance picked up their doll-rags and headed for Russia. The very first I heard of was Wayland Rudd, a minor actor. Then William Patterson, a Harlem lawyer, the Goode brothers, and later Paul Robeson, who at that time was the idol of the American public.5 At the time, Russia seemed like an odd kind of a place for a pleasure visit, but otherwise, I paid the matter no mind.

  My active curiosity was aroused when around 1930, Langston Hughes and Louise Thompson led a group of some twenty-odd Negroes to this same Russia.6 It was beginning to look like a trend. The rumor was that these people had been selected to produce Negro plays in the Soviet Union. But among them, there was no director, no playwright, no nothing theatrical. Just an oddment of young Negroes at loose ends. So when I asked questions, I was told that the Kremlin was extremely interested in the American Negro. The communists wanted to be our kissing-friends.

  I was very interested to know just why they were grinning up to our faces. The press of the world was reporting actual starvation and nakedness in parts of Russia. So I knew that there was some kind of a bug under that chip when I was told that the “People” of the Soviet Union were terribly distressed over the “horrible conditions” existing among the American Negroes. That just did not sound natural to me. People who are hungry and cold just do not worry about things like that thousands of miles away.

  Yet and still, my informants gleamed and glowed as they told me how the Russians fairly vominated a thing like race prejudice, and meant to come to our rescue. In fact, Russia was the sworn champion of all the darker peoples of the world. And in particular, we American Negroes were so downtrodden, they deeply pitied our case.

  Right then and there they lost one black sheep. I was poor, but I certainly did not feel pitiful. But anyhow, I wanted information, so I asked just what Russia could do, even if our condition had been as they claimed. I just could not conceive of Uncle Sam letting Stalin sit in on, say, a Cabinet session, nor presiding over the Senate and swinging votes. I tried hard to visualize armed Russians invading our Georgia and dealing with a mob that had been a little hasty with a brother in black.

  So what the hen-fire could Russia do for us? And why did we look so valuable to Stalin? Numerically we were a scanty tenth of the population of the United States. We did not sit in on the policy-making bodies of government. We had no control whatsoever over the Armed Forces of the nation. Compared to the vast wealth of the nation, economically, we did not weigh too much. Nor were we overcrowded with technicians and scholars. So why did the communists want us so badly?

  From reading, listening closely in silence, and watching things, I discovered our peculiar value to Soviet Russia. I soon saw that they did not love us just because our skins were black. The USSR was bent on world conquest through Asia. They saw in us a shoe-string with which they hoped to win a tan-yard. A dumb, but useful tool.

  In spite of the world brotherhood propaganda, it was obvious that Soviet Russia was bent on carrying out the Czarist Russian plans to be masters of Asia. Once they had had a toe-hold in China, but had been expelled from there early around 1904 by the more alert and ingenious Nipponese. Now, while pretending to feel for the little peoples of the whole world, meanwhile issuing hot denials of imperialistic intentions, the Soviet was bent and bound to continue the march to the East. And that was right where we American Negroes could come in handy. With the war-like and determined Nipponese standing across their way of empire, plus Western influences, we were badly needed. The Asiatic millions must be led to fear and thoroughly hate the sight of a white skin. To rise up against their leaders, place their dependence on Russia, swamp Japan, and throw the “white oppressors” out. It must be repeated and kept in mind that this passionate love of the non-whites did not apply to Japan, for obvious reasons.

  So the brains in the Kremlin eagerly seized upon the race propaganda of the United States, feeling sure and certain that they really had something that they could use. It could be dusted over Asia to good effect. A horrible example of white rule over darker races. A most frightful scarecrow to shake at the peoples of Asia, and thus hasten them into the arms of the Soviets.

  With the then twelve million Negroes in the United States won and done, we could be filed away for the day of revolution here. The dumb black brutes to bear the actual burden of physical combat. Highly expendable. One white zealot discoursed to me at length on the glory we would win under the party, come that day, and millions of us would fall out in the streets behind the barricades to win freedom for the oppressed masses from our “masters.”

  When the man kept on mentioning Negroes, Negroes and nothing but Negroes “out there,” I was moved to enquire:

  “While we’re out there tussling with the might and power of the Armed Forces of these United States, just where will you be?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake! If we are willing to do the thinking for you, you ought to be glad and proud to do the fighting.”

  Accented just like that.

  “I see,” I murmured, and I did. I said it calmly enough, but inside I had jumped as salty as a mackerel. This gang looked down upon us and despised us. They discounted our abilities and integrity infinitely more than those southerners from whom they were pretending to defend us. On top of that, their raw flattery and insulting patronage was intended to hide cold and ruthless hearts. The plan was obviously to herd in the dumb black fools, and when the time arrived to use us up like so many worn-out undershirts and think nothing about it. I thought some more, and by then there was nothing in the drugstore that would kill them all quicker than I, come that day. Nobody has ever yet celebrated being taken for a chump, even by a smart man, and when it is tried by a dumb chuckle-head, that puts knobs on it.

  While they waited for the day of revolution, the third important use the communists planned for the Negro masses was to lie down and act as the mud-sills of the proposed American peasant party. This was to be maneuvered in a way to carry out unknowingly, the program of the communists.

  The party felt a deep need for such a stratum. The Kremlin had launched out on the conquest of the world by analogy. Then they began to see that what worked among the peasants in Russia did not work so well here. This country was too rich, the working man too well fed, clothed and housed. There was no grinding poverty to make men bitter and desperate. The place was much too juicy and jumpy. Poor folks went up the ladder and rich men tumbled down. What was needed was a permanent bottom-class. Somebody who could be made to feel at the scratchy bottom, and no chance to get up from there without the violent overthrow of their “masters.”

  They found nothing like that on hand. As one rich and well-born matron said to me, “We do not employ Americans of any color as domestic help. White or black, there are no American servants. They are all millionaires, temporarily short of funds. Instead of being content where they are, they plan to be the boss themselves next year.”

  So, without putting a name to it, the commies went about creating a permanent lower class by dialectic persuasion. Wealthy persons per se were born vipers. There was a great weeping and wailing over share-croppers and the like. All unskilled labor was glorified in words, but bedded down as far as possible to form a foundation for this peasant class. The pleasures of peasantry were lauded to the skies. To make it appear inevitable, the nation was flooded with propaganda about there being no more frontiers; no more chances at all for free enterprise; not a prayer for a lone individual to rise by his own efforts. No more nothing but collectivism. It was like a rotting fog hovering over the land. It was as if from a vigorous youth, the United States had arrived overnight at a decaying old age. It was a case of don’t try anything. If you could barely keep alive then you were spying noble. The trade unions were invaded and the line peddled that the members were really serfs. No more individuals at all. Their case was really pitiful. Nothing to do but hate bosses and work toward the day when they could do away with their hated oppressors. So labor disorders of an unheard-of intensity and violence swept the nation. It has taken years for many to come out of this fog and return to the American tradition.

  The proposed peasant party failed to come off. Mostly, it failed because the Negro, the intended mud-sill, refused to hold still so that he could be built upon. What the party overlooked is the fact that the Negro is the most class-conscious individual in the United States. The biggest snob in America, bar none, is a Negro house servant. It works in varying degrees up and down the line. Kings and potentates, yes! Good groceries, fast cars and fancy shoes, yes indeed! Draped down in raiments of needlework, the average American Negro would much rather call in ten doctors to tell him how near he is dressed to death, than to have one commissar come around to tell him how near dead he will be before he is allowed a change of clothes. The party, misinformed, grabbed the wrong sow by the ear. The dear peasant in the Soviet Union, in his shapeless felt boots and slurping his cabbage soup, meant exactly nothing to us. Just the thing we are striving to get away from. For us to long for that would call for much more persuasion than the party has been able to deliver.

  How dead the permanent bottom-man is in the United States was pointed up by last November’s elections. The huge majorities piled up by Taft and others who opposed regimentation of the working man said a mouthful.7 The average American still sees himself as a yeasty man. Why kill the boss? He might be the big boss himself next year. It has been done time after time and again. Every man a king when he gets his break.