Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

59. Jaures,Wolfe,Lerner, Ellison, Baldwin, Burns

         "Something has happened to the American Negro in the era of the New Deal and of World War II, and it is something that will have to be reckoned with by those who are measuring forces in World War III. They have found a moral and political principle that can only be expressed in the words Thomas Wolfe once used: a principle 'Whereon the pillars of this earth are founded, Toward which the conscience of the world is tending--A wind is rising and the rivers flow.' That principle is, of course, the principle of a democracy which is not qualified by race or color or any other stupid irrelevance. It is idle to point to the undoubted fact that the position of the American Negro is slowly improving, that the injustice to him is being diluted, that the lynchings are fewer, that the discriminations are slowly being whittled away" (Lerner 101). This passage from Max Lerner's Actions and Passions in 1949 clearly shows that more progress must be made to ensure the equal rights, protections, and opportunities exist for the African American today. Lerner goes on to say that the African American soldiers during wartime fought in countries that respected their race, ironically against the racism of a Hitler and Mussolini, then sadly returned to America and experienced racism at home. "Democracy makes many claims," avers Lerner, "and talks very loudly about itself"; however, "it must also face the music, and pay the reckoning" (102). Since that time, Brown versus Board of Education and other Civil Rights legislation have been enacted, yet much remains to be done, even to approach equality. As James MacGregor Burns avers in The Cross Winds of Freedom (1989), "Blacks were tempted north in much the same ways European immigrants had been tempted west, by glowing reports of jobs, schools, 'freedom,' but often they found that they had merely exchanged their rural ghettos for urban ones" (Burns 315). Jean Jaures once said that we must take from the past its fires, not its ashes. These fires are the fires of enthusiasm and rebirth, not those that spark violence and death. Lerner goes on to say, "Never in our history have we been in as great a danger of scattering our heritage to the wind" (97). Although this statement was made following the throes of World War II and the threat of Russian conflict, the author's statement in many ways applies to the United States today. As Ralph Ellison suggests in Shadow and Act (1953), "What is needed in our country is not an exchange of pathologies, but a change on the basis of society. This is a job which both Negroes and whites must perform together. In Negro culture there is much of value for America as a whole. What is needed are Negroes to take it and create of it 'the uncreated consciousness of their race.' In doing so they will do far more, they'll help create a more human American.'"(Ellison 317). In Nobody Knows My Name (1954), James Baldwin expresses a similar idea when he says, "A country is only as good --I don't care now about the Constitution and the laws, at the moment let us leave theses things aside--a country is only as strong as the people want it to become. Now, this country is going to be transformed. It will not be transformed by an act of God, but by all of us, by you and me. I don't believe any longer that we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hands. We made the world we're living in and we have to make it over" (Baldwin 126).

Works Cited

Baldwin, James. Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Dell, 1961.

Burns, James MacGregor. The Crosswinds of Freedom. Norwalk, Connecticut: The Easton Press, with special permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, 1989.

Ellison, Ralph. Shadow and Act. New York: Vintage International, 1995.

Lerner, Max. Actions and Passions: Notes ion the Multiple Revolution of Our Time. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1949.