When it was decided to reissue J. Saunders Redding’s famous little book in a paperback edition, we wrote to Mr. Redding at Hampton Institute, where he teaches English, to ask if he wished to update the book or perhaps write a new introduction. In due course an answer arrived from Nigeria, where Mr. Redding is presently lecturing and traveling, telling us to go ahead with whatever updating we would think important to the text. We went over the book carefully. It is true, some things have changed:

This is personal. I would call it a “document” except that the word has overtones of something official, vested and final. But I have been clothed with no authority to speak for others, and what I have to say can be final only for myself. I hasten to say this at the start, for I remember my anger at the effrontery of one who a few years ago undertook to speak for me and twelve million others. I concurred with practically nothing he said. This was not important in itself, but when one presumes to

I speak only for myself for another reason also. From adolescence to death there is something very personal about being a Negro in America. It is like having a second ego which is as much the conscious subject of all experience as the natural self. It is not what the psychologists call dual personality. It is more complex and, I think, more morbid than that. In the state of which I speak, one receives two distinct impacts from certain experiences and one undergoes two distinct reactions—the one

But the years of my twenties were enkindling and tumultuous. The world was well into that series of social revolutions which started, we are told, with the First World War and is not yet ended, and the American Negro people were a kind of revolutionary catalytic agent in their own country. It was their historic role, to be sure, but it had been suspended while Negroes played a supernumerary part in the European conflict. Americans in general seemed not to realize what had happened in Europe. The

Many Negroes will deny that the force which I have described as daemonic has operated in their lives. If asked about it, they will take quick offense, as if it were of the same stripe as an unnatural sex drive which, of course, is wisely kept secret by those who possess it. They will aver that they live normal , natural , wholesome lives, even in the South. They will point out their “normal” interests in their professional lives and in their home lives. They will tick off the list of their white

Names have been given to the advocates and promoters of various racial policies. There are gradualists (and they are black and white), who feel that somehow by a process of mechanical progression everything will work out, though to what concrete ends they do not say. The race chauvinists advocate a self-sustaining Negro economic, social and cultural island, and seem to have no fear of a destructive typhoon roaring in from the surrounding sea of the white world. The educationists believe that int

Looking back now, I know that the essence of these conflicts was distilled in my own boyhood home. My mother, who certainly would not have phrased it so, or even consciously thought it so, was an individualist. She was also the perfect embodiment of a type of Negro womanhood whose existence is still denied by those who cling to the old abasing habits of thought. Virtuous, educated and noted for her beauty, she lived her short life in a firm belief that the moral exercise of individual initiative

The assumptions that were held valid in my boyhood were all wrong. So much has been said about them that I mention them reluctantly, but their strength is attested by the fact that many, many still trust them. And not merely Southern whites, and the misinformed, and the ignorant; nor whites alone, but blacks. Hodding Carter, novelist and Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, no doubt deserves his reputation as a Southern liberal, but only a few months ago he wrote of “a common insistence upon white

I am an integrationist. I have been for a long time. It is not a principle that I arrived at through intellection. Until the past few years, I did not bring to bear on it whatever intelligence I have. I felt my way to it, just as some men, in spite of obstructing experience, feel their way to ideals of honesty, sobriety and continence. Nor was the feeling of my way wholly conscious. It was rather like the action of one who kicks and splashes frantically to save himself from drowning and suddenly

But I did not forget Communism, then or later. In New York the next year, 1933, the Party was quite fashionable among my acquaintances, some of whom took it seriously. One could be sure that among the guests at Harlem’s middle and upper-class social gatherings would be white people and that these were admitted Communists or fellow travelers at least. Some of them were said to be well known in avant-garde and esoteric circles and in the theater but I had never heard of most of them, and I am incl

Like the capacity for thought and the desire for knowledge, the instincts for personal liberty and, within reason, power over one’s destiny are attributes of the human mind. They are stronger in some than in others. Where they have been weakened by catastrophe—say long-continued planned violence, as in war; or widespread social disorganization, as in times of great economic crises—the instincts can be perverted, or even totally destroyed. There was danger of this perversion (which actually devel

So far as I know, no one from the outside has ever tried to infect the Negro group with fascism. There have been some inside the group, but, excepting Marcus Garvey, I do not think they were consciously fascist. Negro colleges have tended to breed fascism—I would say a mild form of it, except that fascism is organically hysterical and there is no mild form of it—and I have met Negro college presidents whose notions are provocative of suspicious wonder and who, by the way they run “their” institu

Perhaps I make too much of this, and perhaps I am overwrought and unreasonable about it. I must confess that there flit across my mind, like stones skipped on the surface of water (only to sink into it), thoughts of my sons. There are moments when I am sentimental enough to hope that history is a necessary progress toward better things and that frustrations of the human spirit grow less and less. I know better. But I have such hopes when my sons are involved, and I am inclined to support them in

I am well aware that there is supposed to be something reprehensible in advocating marriage between races—enough, were I a faculty member in a public-supported college in the South, to bring about my dismissal for advocacy of it. In some metaphysical corner of the white man’s mind intermarriage is identified with immorality, biological peculiarity and perversion. This identification is partly a matter of conscience and, as Gunnar Myrdal exhaustively explains, partly a matter of jealousy. The unr

While I am in a petulant mood, let me say that I am race-conscious enough to be shocked and irritated frequently by what even professed white friends do not know, on both the personal and historical level, about Negroes. There is a glaring case in point. During her husband’s administration, Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt became acquainted with a black, bosomy and intensely dynamic woman named Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune. The Negro woman was then Deputy Administrator of NYA, and through her the President’s

But there are limits to what even knowledge can accomplish, as any psychologist will tell you. Knowledge alone is not enough to redeem life from folly and to save men from despair. If it ever was, it is no longer valid to assume that learning’s supreme glory is in the safeguarding of humanity, the dispelling of prejudice, and the achieving of those moral values that are said to have inspired men of other ages. Perhaps I am deeply pessimistic, but I simply cannot believe that if only people knew

Although I am not a very religious person, I do not see how I can leave God out of consideration in these matters. God has been made to play a very conspicuous part in race relations in America. At one time or another, and often at the same time, He has been the protagonist for both sides. He has damned and blessed first one side and then the other with truly godlike impartiality. His ultimate intentions, revealed to inspired sages, are preserved in a thousand volumes. Anyone who reads the liter

Now that I come to the end of this essay I realize that I have not done for myself all that I had hoped to do. I am not purged: I am not cured of my sickness. Perhaps it is not of the sort that can be cured by individual home remedies. I thought that in the writing of this essay I could pour myself out, in the manner of a Job or a Jeremiah, or through a kind of free recall achieve the liberation and inner peace which seemed so desirable. But even as I wrote I discovered that the very fact of bei