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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VIII. Social Stratification - 31. Caste and Class - 3. The Caste Struggle
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Chapter 31. Caste and Class 681
Negroes to fight back, to maintain solidarity in a crisis. Claude iJlcKay
wrote:
If we must die, let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs.
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die, Oh let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, kinsmen! we must meet the common foe!
Though far outnumbered let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we’ll face the murderous cowardly pack.
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!^^
McKay tells how the poem was reprinted in every Negro publication of
any consequence, that it was repeated in Negro clubs, cabarets, and at Negro
mass meetings, and that ministers ended their sermons with it. The Negro
statesman, James Weldon Johnson, in his Negro Americans^ What Now?
prompts his people:
When we are confronted by the lawless, pitiless, brutish mob, and we know that
life is forfeit, we should not give it up; we should, if we can, sell it, and at the
dearest price we are able to put on it.^®
Johnson is, of course, far from recommending force as a political means for
Negroes. Just above the words quoted in the text he stated:
We must condemn physical force and banish it from our minds. But I do not
condemn it on any moral or pacific grounds. The resort to force remains and will
doubtless always remain the rightful recourse of oppressed peoples. Our own country
was established upon that right. I condemn physical force because 1 know that in
our case it would be futile.^**
But even today when the mob or the vigilantes are out for Negro blood in
the South the ordinary effect will be that the Negroes in terror will individ-
ually stay where they are or run to seek escape. They will ordinarily not
fight back.® Considering the power situation, they cannot be criticized. They
are probably wise, not only individually but in the interest of their group.”*”’
In Northern cities, where the Negro population is more compact and
* Since the beginning of the Second World War, Southern Negroes have shown some
inclination to organize and fight back when they are attacked. (See Chapter 27, Section
5; Chapter 35, Section 10 j
and Chapter 45, Section 7.)
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