I knew what she meant. She could no longer be arrested in ethnocentric coils: she did not wish to be. The human spirit is bigger than that. The specialization of the senses and talent and learning (more than three fourths of the Negro Ph.D.’s have done their doctoral dissertations on some subject pertaining to the Negro!) that is expected of Negroes by other members of their race and by whites is tragic and vicious and divisive. I am tired of trying, in deference to this expectation, to feel my way into the particularities of response and reaction that are supposed to be exclusively “Negro.” I am tired of the unnatural obligation of converting such talent and learning as I have into specialized instruments for the promotion of a false concept called “race.” This extended essay, then, is probably my last public comment on the so-called American race problem. 5 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 intellectual competence as indicated by the number of Negro Phi Beta Kappas, doctors of philosophy and various experts will win for the race the respect it does not now receive. There are the individualists who urge that each man work out for himself the compromises that will bring the self-fulfillment he seeks. Finally there are the radicals (there are no degrees of radicalism among them) who, because they seem to see destruction as an end and would first uproot everything, are actually nihilists. Various racial and biracial institutions look on themselves as representing and implementing one or the other of these policies. The Southern Regional Council, for instance, is gradualist. The Negro press is chauvinist. Most Negro Greek-letter organizations (of which there are seven national and many dozen sectional and local) are educationist. Howard University—though not its president—and the best-known private Negro colleges are individualistic in their approach. Until its demise, the National Negro Congress was radical.