"TELL me," asked the British visitor, "do your Negroes play golf?"
The question, put to a U.S. businessman, brought a stammering answer.
Yes, said the businessman, he supposed that U.S. Negroes played golf, but he had never seen one with a club in his hand. Come to think of it, he'd seen a picture of Joe Louis on a golf course, but he had no idea at what club Joe could play.
The incident illustrates how little white Americans generally know about their colored fellow citizens. Negroes, in the phrase of the sociologists, have "high social visibility." But their lives are in effect invisible to most Americans, who rarely bother to look behind the Color Curtain at the Negroes' homes, their places of work or worship, or their spirit. There is, as a matter of fact, some news about Negro golfing.
¶Atlanta and New Orleans recently opened golf courses for Negroes.
¶In Seattle, Negroes are now free to play on all public golf courses (but they still may not take part in tournaments played on the same courses).
¶In Chicago, where they play on public courses without restriction, the number of Negro golfers has gone up from 25, a few years ago, to more than 2,000.
¶In New York there are no restrictions on public courses, and Negroes do play in tournaments.
These facts & figures, modest in themselves, are symptoms of a major revolution in the life of the U.S. Negro—only half-noticed by the rest of the nation. It is a revolution which, although still far from overthrowing segregation, amounts to the biggest, most hopeful change in Negro history since Abraham Lincoln, just 90 years ago, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Says Negro Publisher (Ebony, Jet) John H. Johnson: "Every Negro is a Horatio Alger . . . His trek up from slavery is the greatest success story the world has ever known."
Markers or Progress
One of the great facts of U.S. history is that the Negro, no matter how ill used, has remained deeply loyal to the U.S., always hoping for the "Year of Jubilo," stubbornly telling himself
The very time I thought I was lost
The dungeon shook and the chain jell off . . .
You got a right, I got a right,
We all got a right to the tree of life . . .
The fruit from the tree of life is still rationed, and often bitter. The U.S.'s 15 million Negroes are still denied the right to the pursuit of happiness on equal terms with whites. Negroes still do the meanest jobs and get the lowest pay; they must slowly wrest from their white fellows a table in a restaurant, a desk in a school, a smile, the privilege of praying in a white church or using a white swimming pool. This is true on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. While the Negro is generally better off, economically and socially, in the North (as is shown by the fact that thousands of Southern Negroes still move north every year), the North has no cause to feel superior. The chains of prejudice can be as heavy in New York's Harlem or on Chicago's South Side as anywhere in the South. Yet North & South, the Year of Jubilo seems a little closer.
In 1942, in a brilliant study of the American Negro, Swedish