Negro writers remain generally unrepresented in anthologies of American literature, though in the light of the cultural history of America, the slave biographies (and there are some “literary” ones among them) are at least as important as anything Seba Smith, Charles Augustus Davis, John P. Kennedy and William Gilmore Simms ever wrote. Paul Lawrence Dunbar was a better poet, and, in the opinion of William Dean Howells, a more popular poet and, by the very standard of indigenousness which some anthologists claim to follow, a more important poet than James Whitcomb Riley. James Weldon Johnson and Claude McKay enjoyed international reputations as writers, but they are absent from the best-known American anthologies. Richard Wright has been translated into a dozen languages, including the Chinese, and is rated by Europeans with Steinbeck, Hemingway and Faulkner, but American anthologies neglect him. Gwendolyn Brooks has won the Pulitzer prize for poetry, which is more than Jesse Stuart and William Carlos Williams have done, but her work is not in the collections of American writing. Nor is the most representative work by whites who have written about Negroes with some regard for justice and truth. Editors use Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” “The Bear” and chapters from _Sartoris_ and _Told by an Idiot_, but not “Evening Sun Go Down,” or excerpts from _Light in August_ and _Intruder in the Dust_. Chapters from _Huckleberry Finn_ are used, but not those which show Nigger Jim to be much like other human beings, nor those which excoriate the institution of slavery and express Huck’s hatred of it. George W. Cable is generally represented by selections from _Old Creole Days_ and innocuous passages from _The Grandissimes_, but never by _Madame Delphine_ (certainly one of his best books), _The Silent South_ or _The Negro Question_. The result of this arrogant neglect has been to render American cultural history less effective as an instrument of diagnosis and evaluation. What we have as history reflects little credit upon American historians as scholars. Their work makes pleasant reading and inflates the national ego, but it does not tell those sometimes hard and shameful truths that might now be helpful for the world to know. What Lillian Smith calls “the old conspiracy of silence” needs to be broken, and the “maze of fantasy and falsehood that [has] little resemblance to the actual world” needs to be dissolved. The psychopathic resistance to self-knowledge that the American mind has developed must be broken down. What we have got to know are the things that actually happened—and are still happening—in America. With these things clear before us, perhaps we can use our knowledge and experience for the guidance of mankind. 15