Light on an American Dilemma?

No one can read The Negro in American Civilization by Nathaniel Weyl (Public Affairs Press, $6.00) without realizing: a) that we have long needed a compendious and objective survey of the facts about the American Negro (not least of all because many of those facts have been systematically suppressed and misrepresented); b) that we—not merely “we” in America but “we” in the West—do have a “Negro problem,” the mishandling of which may be the instrument we shall use to destroy ourselves; and c) that the author, clearly a man of intellectual honesty, is attempting to perform a signal service for us all, and especially (for he will surely be accused of the contrary) for the American Negroes themselves.

Let us speak first of the author’s intellectual honesty. Just as Columbus did not set out to discover America, so Nathaniel Weyl did not set out to write this book. What he intended, he tells us, was a modest little study of the “changing status” of the Negro under the American Constitution—one, moreover, that was to be predicated upon and to document the prevailing mythology as to what constitutes “justice” for the Negro. His subject-matter, however, grew and broadened under his hand, carrying him into areas that he had “intended to ignore.” He discovered that “material which passed for the objective findings of social scientists could more accurately be characterized as rationalizations and propaganda wearing academic cap and gown.”

WK

About the Author

Willmoore Kendall

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No one can read The Negro in American Civilization by Nathaniel Weyl (Public Affairs Press, $6.00) without realizing: a) that we have long needed a compendious and objective survey of the facts about the American Negro (not least of all because many of those facts have been systematically suppressed and misrepresented); b) that we—not merely “we” in America but “we” in the West—do have a “Negro problem,” the mishandling of which may be the instrument we shall use to destroy ourselves; and c) that the author, clearly a man of intellectual honesty, is attempting to perform a signal service for us all, and especially (for he will surely be accused of the contrary) for the American Negroes themselves.

Let us speak first of the author’s intellectual honesty. Just as Columbus did not set out to discover America, so Nathaniel Weyl did not set out to write this book. What he intended, he tells us, was a modest little study of the “changing status” of the Negro under the American Constitution—one, moreover, that was to be predicated upon and to document the prevailing mythology as to what constitutes “justice” for the Negro. His subject-matter, however, grew and broadened under his hand, carrying him into areas that he had “intended to ignore.” He discovered that “material which passed for the objective findings of social scientists could more accurately be characterized as rationalizations and propaganda wearing academic cap and gown.”