I had written a book called _No Day of Triumph_, and the Communists saw advance copies of it. They liked it, though I am still puzzled why. Perhaps it was because I did not actually condemn Communism, but, as a matter of fact, expressed sympathy for one Mike Chowan who had long been a Communist and who had fought with the Lincoln Battalion in Spain. Whatever the reason, _New Masses_ first published an excerpt from my book, without, as I remember, getting either my permission or that of the publisher. Soon after the _New Masses_ excerpt appeared and several weeks before publication, I began to get letters from Communists all over the country. Some of these came from bookstore managers who told me that they were going to push the book and who invited me to teas and to hold autograph parties. I accepted only one of these invitations—to speak to a group in Washington, where I had to go on other business anyway. Later I was asked to appear on a radio program with Ella Winters in Philadelphia, but a previous commitment interfered. A little while after publication, I went to New York to attend a dinner party for Carl Van Vechten. When that was over sometime after midnight, without quite realizing what we were in for, my wife and I accepted an invitation to another gathering, and found ourselves in an apartment on West 56th Street, surrounded by a motley crowd who told me that they were going to make _No Day of Triumph_ a best seller. They were going to put me, as a writer, they said, in the same income class with Howard Fast and Richard Wright, who, they claimed, but for them, would not have been where they were. Toward dawn, what seemed to be a committee of three cornered me in the kitchenette and asked me whether I would sign a card. I said I would have to think about it. What I have written above is what I thought. 11 So far as I know, no one from the outside has ever tried to infect the Negro group with fascism. There have been some inside the group, but, excepting Marcus Garvey, I do not think they were consciously fascist. Negro colleges have tended to breed fascism—I would say a mild form of it, except that fascism is organically hysterical and there is no mild form of it—and I have met Negro college presidents whose notions are provocative of suspicious wonder and who, by the way they run “their” institutions, seem to be convinced that the methods of democracy are weak and decadent. Themselves, generally, victims of a tyranny imposed from without, they are tyrants within the academic group, and, if given a chance, outside it too. They play the strong man and the dictator role. They think that people and things should be “lined up” by the superior intellects with which they feel their positions endow them. They have a vast contempt for faculty members whom they regard as justly underprivileged employees perhaps of somewhat more value than janitors but of considerably less value than football coaches.