By ALAIN LOCKE

Part II.

ADDENDA TO BIBLIOGRAPHY OF LITERATURE OF THE NEGRO: 1936

Minty Alley-A Novel+C. L. R. James, Martin, Secker & Warburg, London, 7/6.

Toussaint Louverture-A Play-in Life and Letters Today, London.

The Black Laws of Virginia-June P. Guild, Whittet & & Shepperson, Richmond, Va.

The Negro in the Philadelphia Press-George E. Simpson, University of Pennsylvania Press, $2.00. Opportunities for Medical Education of Negroes— E. H. L. Corwin & G. E. Strugees. Charles Scribners, N. Y., $1.50.

The Moveable School Comes to The Negro FarmerT. M. Campbell, Tuskegee Press, Ala.

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HE layman will doubtless not have expected reality from the novelist, poet and dramatist, but will expect it of the economist and sociologist. But I, for my part, would rather take my chance with the fraternity of recreative insight and imagination than with the professedly objective analysts and reporters. For they, like philosophers, idolize their "isms" while pretending to worship "fact”—(only,- philosophers don't always pretend), and at their worst, are like downright social theologians, peddling their pet panaceas for society's final and everlasting salvation. A critic's job, as I see it, with this increasingly controversial and competitive situation, is to tag and label as properly and fairly as he can and let the public buy and eat, each to his own pocketbook and taste. And so, by their schools, we shall know them.

Speaking of schools of economics and sociology, however, it is pathetically interesting to note how many otherwise intelligent people approach the Negro question with hopelessly antiquated categories. They only half realize that Booker T. Washington is long since dead, and would undoubtedly have changed tactics in the shifting issues of our times, as his professed followers have not, and do not seem to comprehend that Dr. Du Bois has left a deftly moulted skin occupying his traditional position and is nesting in quite another. And to me, it seems their primary motivation is their own mental comfort, for the changes are too obvious for open eyes to overlook. Fortunately-(or unfortunately for the "comfortables-at-all-costs"), we have today not only an amazing gamut of positions, a rich variety of schools of interpretation but, most important of all, ever lessening of

the old fallacy of trying to have a special yardstick for the Negro problem and a separate formulae for its solution apart from the basic general problems of our contemporary society. Even for those who reject it-(or them, since the Marxist positions are so sub-divided), the class theory must be credited at least with this fundamental gain, that it carries through a 'sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander' analysis and links the Negro question into the general scheme and condition of society. But this year's literature of the social aspects of Negro life ranges through almost the whole spectrum of possible views; strict Communist interpretations, the Communist opposition, a revised Marxist interpretation, several non-Marxist but modernistic economic and anthropological analyses, two schools of economics,-the traditional and the institutionalist, studies of the race question from the labor unionist angle, Y.W.C.A. and Methodist church humanitarian liberalism, orthodox and liberal imperialism, and the now professionalized gradualism of the missionaristic-philanthropic approach, which is the contemporary survival of the HamptonTuskegee school of thought. Hardly a notch is missing, unless it be the C.I.O. craft-union labor philosophy, which has its important conception of the industrial and economic problems of the black laborer. Here, then, they string themselves out for the wisely critical reader to window-shop through the whole display or for the impatiently practical to get the right-size sociological hat or an economic shoe to fit, with perhaps an aesthetic tie and kerchief to match.

Alien Americans, by an eminent and experienced Dutch colonial administrator who studied the American race question under the auspices of the Rosenwald Fund, has the advantage of perspective and urbane detachment. It is a good precedent to set,—to discuss American minority problems and attitudes over a common denominator, and Dr. Shrieke discusses the Chinese and the Japanese in the West, the Mexicans in the South and Mid-West, the American Indians, the Filipino and then the bulk of the Negro problem. His conclusion, however, that, even though the product of a traditional and common American policy, there is a progressive slackening of prejudice with education and enlightenment toward the other groups, but a "petrification" of the attitudes toward the Negro, really contradicts, if true, his original assumption that they are the same social

phenomenon, only different in degree. Likewise, his essentially economic solution, claiming that "a systematic effort must be made to free. the South from its colonial economy" and proposing the "development of a free peasant economy in the rural South" is not in exact alignment with the author's differential diagnosis; nor the statement:-"For anyone who studies southern problems objectively, it is evident that there is an identity of black and white interests. Up till now the plantation legend has impeded the realization of this fact. Will it be otherwise in the future?" In spite of such inconsistencies and its frankly pessimistic turn, Dr. Schrieke's book should be widely read; his graphic and incisive description of the American patterns of racial discrimination has seldom, if ever, been equalled. His account of what he calls the "Great Southern Legend," of the concrete inconsistencies of southern ways and morals, his pointed suggestion that "the black spectre rules the South" all register a high score for the descriptive and analytical side of a most stimulating study. It is perhaps too much to expect, especially from a foreign visitor, equal excellence of diagnosis and proposed remedy.

Under the auspices of the Friendship Press, in a well-intentioned and valuable project of the study of the race question by Methodist church groups, Professor Charles S. Johnson contributes A Preface to Racial Understanding. That this book is obviously a primer for the great unenlightened does not excuse Dr. Johnson's equally obvious lapse from the advanced position of last year's book, The Collapse of Cotton Tenancy, to the "coaxing school" of moralistic gradualism and sentimental missionary appeal, especially since these concessions are almost entirely absent from another book in the same scries;-Corinne Brown's Story of the American Negro, which states the Negro's case with its moral challenges unblunted and its sociological warnings clear. The constructive effect of much painstaking and competent exposition is thus regrettably off-set by such evasive and wheedling gradualism; as reflected in statements like:-"In the field of race relations, it is not so important that there should be envisaged exact solutions, for there will inevitably be differences of opinion. . . it is important that there should be principles guiding these relationships, and that these principles should be high. . . . A sound principle of action, thus could well be: "Respect thy neighbor as thyself, even if thou canst not love him, and do not permit that he or thyself be treated with disrespect." A primer may warrantably be ele

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for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, gives us a convincing statement of fundamentals in his Preface to Peasantry, and with it perhaps a hint as to what Dr. Schrieke specifically meant by his "creation of a free peasant economy in the South." For Mr. Raper, after an intensive survey of typical plantation farm areas, concludes: "With no reasonable hope that an adequate civilization for the majority of the rural dwellers will come either with the rejuvenation or with the collapse of the cotton plantation system, the reclamation of Greene and Macon counties and of much of the cotton South awaits a constructive land policy" . . . a policy enabling "the poorest farmers to build up the soil, to own livestock, to raise vegetables and fruits for their own tables, to cooperate with their fellows in making their purchases and in producing and marketing crops-in short, if it enables landless farmers to attain ownership and self-direction on an adequate plane. Comfortable homes, more doctors, better schools, and wholesome human relations can be maintained only through such basic economic advances. These are not simple matters, and their accomplishment will require the investment of large sums of public money and an administrative personnel with scientific training and a bold faith in the common man." With such thoroughgoing and almost revolutionary specifications, "a free peasant economy" does have a constructive connotation and an attractive challenge as a proposed solution. Mr. Raper's trenchant report of the ways in which the New Deal's agricultural relief measures were thwarted by the traditions and practises of the old regime calls for timely consideration of stringent safeguards for the next steps in the government's agricultural program for the South. Here is a vital book with a modern message; giving added evidence of the way in which the basic and realistic approach to race questions is gaining ground.

Turning aside, however, for a while from the mass aspects of things, we encounter a considerable batch of biography in the literature of the year, with an interesting human sample array of personalities. Twelve Negro Americans, by Mary Jenness, is also a Friendship Press book, taking a cross-section view of the Negro social pyramid at an unusual level,-that of social work and uplift projects, calculated to appeal particularly to the missionary aim of the series. These life stories of a leading liberal pastor, a pioneer organizer of cooperatives, a Jeannes school supervisor, the organizer of the Tuskegee farm extension service, several social workers

an important segment of race leadership. On this level of human interest and appeal, the humanitarian and moralistic notes are not out of place; indeed, have their proper usefulness provided the palliatives of social work and uplift movements are not posed as "ways of solving the race problem," which they are not and cannot be. It is only this implication that detracts from this readable collection of human interest and "success" stories.

Professor Brawley gives us this year a much needed biography of Paul Laurence Dunbar; so needed that it may seem ungrateful to mention its limitations. However, it is far more successful as an extended essay of literary criticism than as biography. For a Victorian biography of an only semi-Victorian poet and an entirely un-Victorian personality misses the most vital of all biographical objectives, the re-creation of a personality. A sugar-coated Dunbar, like a sugar-coated Bobby Burns, may even go further than taking the flavor out of biography, since the dilemmas of the personality had connection with the leading motives in the poetry, it may also take a vital dimension out of the critical analysis and literary interpretation. And for this reason the first biography of Dunbar, welcome though it is, can never take rank as the definitive one.

In From Harlem to the Rhine, Colonel Arthur Little elaborately documents the epic story of the New York 15th Regiment in the World War. It is written with candor and obvious devotion, and only misses being a great tribute by the narrow margin of bad dialect reporting and little realization of the irony of the whole venture. As it is, with its concrete vindication of the black soldier and its remarkable tribute to Jim Europe, an important gap in Negro history has been filled in, from an undisputable eye-witness. It is good reading for Negroes, but should be prescribed reading for whites, for it is as ironic comment on American democracy as ever has been or could be written. Another missing chapter of American social history comes clear in Herbert Asbury's history of the New Orleans underworld,-The French Quarter. It is racially important in many respects, not merely for the reports of the "Quadroon balls," the voodoo cults of Marie Laveau et al, and the levities of Basin Street: for the whole social history of the South is laid bare in epitome, even though in perhaps its extremest example. And now for two other not too edifying but significant exposures: John Horsher's journalistic expose of George Baker, "Father Divine, styled "God in a Rolls Royce" and the naive, self-expose of Juanita Harrison, in her

autobiographic travelogue of a trip round the world, called My Great Wide Beautiful World, which should be sub-titled The World Through a Mental Chink. Here certainly is biography with the important modern dimension of human psychology, baffling though it is. Page 80 of the biography of Harlem's self-styled "God" quotes a Negro high school graduate with two years' training at Boston University declaring on the court witness stand that "he believes Father Divine is God" and a white stenographer employed by the Board of Child Welfare testifying to the same effect; two instances, we should say, of seriously deluded thousands. But follow the phenomenon to its root in human suffering and social maladjustment, and the secret of these crowd hypnotists is an open one. Follow even the other line of causation to the social trauma that created the powerful over-compensations of these megalomaniacs, and realize that it was a bad day for society when Garvey was snubbed in his Jamaica boyhood for his dark complexion, and likewise, when, as Horsher reports, in his boyhood town of Savannah, George Baker confronted a socially false Christianity in the guise of a Jim Crow church and Sunday School, which he refused to attend, and later when he "was sent to jail for sixty days for riding in that part of a trolley car reserved exclusively for whites."

From such psychological acorns, with strong personalities, powerful movements grow, dangerously irrational in their creed, but dynamically righteous in their spirit and conviction. So what Mr. Horsher reports as a farce conceals a deep human and social tragedy. As to My Great Wide Beautiful World, the significance fortunately is only individual: an illiterate carried round the world is at the end of the trip, and in the volume that reports it, an illiterate still. And is so, whether a moronic millionaire or a moronic menial. The latter is more unusual, however; Barnum after all may have been the best American sociologist.

Now to more important subjects:-economics, politics and colonial questions. Professor Abram Harris has added an incisive study, The Negro as Capitalist, to his important project of a survey of the economic history of the Negro. Begun in The Black Worker as a partial study of the role of Negro labor in the development of modern industrialism, and specifically as "the role of the Negro industrial worker from the end of the Civil War to 1929," Dr. Harris now covers the history of the Negro as capitalist and investor from pre-Civil War days to the early years of the present depression. Taking advantage, however, of his well-known

thesis about the plight and prospects of a "black bourgeoisie," which he has always viewed as a helplessly handicapped "effort to gain economic status and social respectability by erecting within the larger framework of capitalism a small world of Negro business enterprise, hoping thereby to develop his own capitalist-employer class and to create employment opportunities for an increasing number of Negroes in the white collar occupations," our author extends his economic study into definite sociological implications. From the comparative failure of Negro banking, which beside Negro insurance, has been the largest scale capitalistic effort of Negroes, he argues the improbability of any successful economic petty capitalism as a secure foundation for a Negro middle class; not so much on grounds of inexperience or incompetency (although plenty of that is revealed by the detailed history of Negro business enterprise and particularly Negro banking), but on the grounds that the large-scale capitalistic organization of American business today makes the success of any small-scale capitalist enterprise difficult and highly improbable. So, though its primary significance is as a very thoroughgoing technical economic study, there are practical and sociological corollaries to Dr. Harris's work that must be given serious consideration. His concluding chapter on the "Plight of the Negro Middle Class" would probably be borne out by an equally competent analysis of Negro insurance and retail store enterprise, but caution requires the statement that these conclusions are based mainly on an analysis of Negro banking, taken, however, as a sample.

Charles L. Franklin has written on the crucial subject of the labor front a clear factual analysis and history of the Negro worker of New York City in relation to labor union membership and organization. In spite of substantial improvement in the total numbers of Negroes in labor union affiliation, Dr. Franklin's figures show that Negro membership in unions of the highly skilled workers is negligible and that Negroes constitute a higher proportion in the membership of independent unions than in affiliates of the American Federation of Labor. He finds also that in Manhattan a pre- and post-N.R.A. survey reveals sudden increase in the disposition of Negro labor to organize, as between 3.8 per cent before 1928 and 9.3 per cent with a total unionization quota of 39,574 at present estimate; showing some creditable and significant gains for this period. Such a study needs either to be duplicated for other important industrial

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determined on this all important question of differential occupations labor union affiliation, with opportunity then to compare the policies of the craft and the industrial unions, and labor trends.

In The Negro Question by J. S. Allen, we have the most rigid but at the same time most rigorous Marxian analysis of the American Negro's situation yet written. It redefines the Black Belt in close but commendably lucid statistics and proves the persistence of the plantation system in a large area of the United States which includes millions of blacks and whites in what it justly calls "semi-feudal conditions of semi-slavery," since under the prevailing conditions of farm tenancy and share cropping not only is there a sub-American standard of living but the system of wage labor has never there become the basis of the economic structure of the region. A South thus X-rayed to its economic bones is a startling and challenging revelation: no polemic dust in the air can long obscure such facts. Mr. Allen then applies the Communist formula to this situation with results equally startling and challenging; with his greatest dilemma, of course, the issue between the economic common denominator theory of the proletariat and the politico-cultural formula of self-determination and cultural autonomy for oppressed minorities or in this case, the "oppressed majority"-(50.3 being the latest census figure of the ratio of the Negro population of this Black Belt area and it being 40 per cent of the total Negro population or roughly five mil lions). He decides for the latter, not without careful consideration of the arguments for and against; especially the Norman Thomas criticism that self-determination is impossible under capitalism and unnecessary under socialism. Anti-Communists should read The Negro Question, not so much to agree or be converted, as to realize what alternatives social medicine must experimentally face and try before conceding the desperate measures of social surgery. That the plantation system is economic cancer is something that all can afford to learn and agree upon.

In the international perspectives of the race question, there is also increasing realism of analysis and here and there, increasing radicalism of suggested remedy. Emory Ross paints a sober picture in Qut of Africa, which never could have come out of the missionary movement a decade ago; it is tantamount to an admission of an unholy alliance of the church with imperialism and a warning of the complete in

sents a detailed indictment and expose of the procedures and techniques of contemporary imperialistic exploitation in "How Britain Rules Africa," ending with the realistic conclusion that "the British and the French empires are colored empires, since Africans, Arabs, Egyptians, IndoChinese, Hindus, etc., form the overwhelming majority of their populations . . . and neither England nor France can face another European crisis without the military and economic support of the colonial peoples." In a more dispassionate and urbane vein, Dantes Bellegarde, the esteemed former Haitian Minister to this country, discusses in four lectures delivered at the University of Porto Rico, Haiti and Her Problems, indeed in the concluding lecture, the whole frame-work of Latin American relations. His formula, as might be expected, is international liberalism, trade agreements and honest diplomacy. Finally, Professor Bunche has written for the Negro Folk Education series a very readable digest of the latest scientific and political theories of race, relating them to the issues of modern imperialism and the racial aspects of colonial policy. It is Dr. Bunche's contention, however, that the primary objectives of imperialism are

economic consequences of capitalistic expansion, and that race policies and attitudes are their ex post facto rationalizations. For the same series, Professor Ira Reid has written a manual of adult education principles and techniques for the use of adult education group executives and teachers, stating the specific objectives and experience to date of the adult education movement among Negroes.

Especially because there is a considerable list of Addenda, space scarcely permits further detailed mention, except of the thought provoking issue of the Journal of Negro Education on the Negro School Curriculum and the most competent and enlightening section on West African Civilization of the Negro by Professor Melville Herskovits. The additions reveal a West Indian novelist and playwright of considerable power and much promise, C.L.R. James, author of Minty Alley, a realistic novel of Jamaica city life and a full length Toussaint Louverture, scheduled for performance by the London Stage Society. In Part I, Richard Wright was inadvertently referred to as Willard Wright and John and Allan Lomax, father and son, as the "Lomax brothers."