The Press: The U. S. Negro, 1953

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he gets more of the fruits of the tree of life, his appetite increases. Explains a Manhattan Negro social worker: "A Negro laborer living in Harlem and rarely peering beyond the boundaries of his ghetto might be reasonably content; but if he gets a good job downtown, mixes with white people on a more or less equal basis, and then in the evening is forced to go home to a miserable house in Harlem, he will be bitterly discontented." Says a Negro philosopher, Dr. Alain Locke of Howard University: "The old slum is no longer the problem. It's the new, respectable slum that worries us. We call it Striver's Row." As Negroes move into Striver's Row, their bitterness at remaining inequalities will mount. At the same time, white resentment of growing Negro ambition may mount too.

The Future: Liability or Opportunity?

Justice has been imagined by mankind in many different shapes. Could it be that her face is black or brown? That, at any rate, is the way she is likely to appear to the majority of the world's people, whose skins are colored. They are the people, in Asia and in Africa, whom the U.S. hopes to lead to democracy. They judge the U.S. very largely on evidence drawn from the "Negro problem." The U.S. has probably won more enemies by stories, true and false, about its treatment of Negroes than by any other propaganda; but many Negroes feel that the U.S. could be winning friends instead. Just how much individual Negroes have done to win friends for the U.S. is almost never realized: they have been effective both in the diplomatic service (which so far employs only a handful—about 60) and in personal contacts at Negro universities like Howard, where young people from Africa and Asia come to learn about the U.S. Says Novelist Richard (Native Son) Wright: "The key to Asia is right there in Harlem and on Chicago's South Side."

The Negro problem is basically not economic, or social, or psychological. It is moral. Prejudice does more moral harm to those who harbor it than to those who are hit by it. And the most hopeful fact about the Negro's progress in the last decade is that it could not have been possible without some moral progress by white Americans.

Gunnar Myrdal explained the U.S.'s state of mind on the Negro problem more succinctly and movingly than anyone else: "The ordinary American is the opposite of a cynic. He is on the average more of a believer and a defender of the faith in humanity than the rest of the Occidentals . . . He investigates his faults, puts them on record, and shouts them from the housetops . . . America's handling of the Negro problem has been criticized most emphatically by white Americans . . . and the criticism . . . will not stop until America has completely reformed itself . . . Mankind is sick of fear and disbelief . . . If America in actual practice could show the world [that] the Negro became finally integrated into modern democracy, all mankind would be given faith again . . . and America would have spiritual power many times stronger than all her financial and military resources—the power of the trust and support of all good people on earth. America is free to choose whether the Negro shall remain her liability or become her opportunity."

*First stated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1896. *E.g., ofay (any white man), Mr. Charlie, Miss Anne (Southern whites).