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 developed in some countries in Europe) during America’s great depression, when the feeling grew that only Franklin D. Roosevelt had answers and that everything depended on him. The American people were all but ripe to surrender their minds and the control of their destiny. It was the distortion or atrophy of this instinct that the Communists hoped to find in the American Negro. They had good reason for such hopes, and they were not loath to express it: “The especially intense exploitation and heavy oppression to which the millions of Negroes in America are subject make it imperative for _the Party to devote its best energies and its maximum resources towards becoming the recognized leader and champion ... of Negroes_.”[7] (Italics mine.) The intense exploitation and heavy oppression were true enough. But there was something that the Communists did not take into account; something psychical and perhaps unworldly which even the people whom they hoped to inveigle did not think about. It was not the Negro’s vaunted resiliency, though this was something. Rather it was what I can think of only as the spiritual cohesion of democracy. This cohesion is organic to the delicately balanced ideological structure that democracy is, and it is the attribute which makes it impossible to separate the destiny of America from the destiny of democracy itself. For democracy is less a form of government than it is a way of life, and the principles—freedom, equality, justice—on which this way of life is founded have an appeal as universal as the idea of God. And what I am saying is that in spite of “heavy oppression” and “intense exploitation,” the American Negro believed in the principles. It was this belief in the principles and the impossibility of ever dissociating them in the Negro’s mind from democracy and America that stymied the Communists, who could not understand why the colored people’s hatred of discrimination, segregation and all the inequities did not lead naturally to a hatred of democracy. But it was like expecting them to hate God because preachers are sometimes rascals.