This was a blow—but that is to put it mildly. In our town, as elsewhere in border state and northerly towns, the pattern of a strong, single Negro leadership was fixed (and so, I suspect, was the pattern of a strong, single Polish and Italian and Jewish leadership), and now the white people were in a quandary. The pattern had been broken; they themselves had knocked down the stanchion that gave stability to race relations. A bond issue was coming up, and Negro backing was indispensable to its success. Hitherto the white people had influenced the direction of Negro thought through local Negro leaders. But who were the leaders now? The white people needed them; they felt uncomfortable and even frightened without them; they needed to know and to control, if possible, what the Negroes were thinking. The race riots in Northern cities—Washington, Chester, Chicago—were still green in memory, and Wilmington itself had almost plunged into that civic horror. Congress just then was drumming up a Bolshevist scare, and Congressman James Byrnes, of South Carolina, had called for indictments for sedition against certain national Negro spokesmen.[6] But the Negroes were equally lost and frightened by the immutable evidence of their own factionalism—and frightened the more that white people knew of it. So long as they could seem to maintain a solid front, no matter what internal tensions actually rived them, they felt reasonably safe. But “Now the white people can cut us up,” my father said. “We are divided.” It never occurred to him that the last thing in the world the white people wanted was a divided Negro population. Enforced segregation and the caste system were proof that they did not. My father, who had spent more than two thirds of his life above the Mason-Dixon line, hated segregation, but he had developed the ghetto-mind which made it bearable and safe. A war of impulses was (and is, I fear) going on all the time in both whites and Negroes. It is the symptom of an American psychological malady. It is also an indictment of our culture and an offense against democracy. Many understand this now, but most do not. Indeed, most have built sophistic bulwarks against understanding. They do not know this, for the many small, subtle fallacies which they abide through force of habit lessen their sense of moral conflict when they are faced with the great contradiction. My father’s saying, “Don’t ever trust a white man,” is in intent no different from the white man’s saying, “All niggers look alike to me.” The phrases represent the lowest common denominator in the American race-experience. They are the essence of empiricism. They voice experiences so debased and so bereft of humaneness as utterly to discredit our way of life in the eyes of the world. They deny the inspiring first principle of democracy—that the person counts as person, no matter what his color or creed.