My friend said she watched openmouthed during this masterly performance. “It was like being at the theater, when you’re so struck by the skill of the star that you don’t think of the play itself until after the curtain falls. Or maybe it isn’t skill that strikes you. Maybe it’s personality. I remember Katharine Cornell in —— Well, it was exactly like that,” my friend said, with something very like awe in her voice and in her pale face. She recovered after the curtain had fallen. “Mr. So-and-So,” she asked, “do you mean to tell me you’re begging white people in this community to give you things that everybody ought to have and that you have as much right to as they? This is 1951! Haven’t you heard what’s going on—the legal suits for equalization and all?” “Oh,” the lawyer said, laughing blandly, “they don’t want to sue. They just want a cafeteria like the white schools have.” Thurgood Marshall, chief legal counsel of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has said that the hardest job his staff has had in bringing equal-education suits has been to persuade Negro teachers and representative Negro parents to stand as plaintiffs. They have to be bludgeoned out of their childish faith in the short-term profits of their minority middle-class position. They have to be taught, with pain and patience, that democracy is a legitimate enterprise, that its institutions must make for their dignity, and that they cannot save themselves without forgetting themselves in the struggle to save the rights of man. Negro colleges are doing almost none of this teaching.[9] What I am trying to make clear is the actual condition of the average middle-class American Negro mind halfway through the twentieth century. To explain how this condition came about would involve a good deal of history. Besides, I have already tried to explain it in another place. The only point is that the condition does exist, and it is not healthy. Nor can it be cured, it seems to me, by the superficial therapy of integration on special levels—the graduate and professional-school level, for instance—which is now being hailed as a cure-all. It is not. Integration on this level is at best a victory for the method of democracy, and method and spirit are not necessarily one. For years upper middle-class American Negroes have been going to graduate and professional schools with whites without learning, and without stimulating by their presence there, the inclusive kind of thinking that is necessary to the fulfillment of the spirit of democracy. Associations on such levels are as casual and random as the flow of unchanneled waters. They do not bite deep into idea patterns, nor thrust themselves down into the matrix of emotion.