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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 35. The Negro Protest - 9. Negro History and Culture
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Chapter 35. The Negro Protest 753
tion. It was a basic means of satisfying white men’s needs to justify slavery
and white superiority that the ^^dark continent” be regarded as a place of
cultureless savagery. This tradition of African inferiority has continued in
the white world long after the American Indian, the Polynesian, and the
Stone Age man were given applause for high cultural achievement. Only
recently have even the anthropologists realized that African Negroes have
surpassed most other pre-literate groups in at least the fields of govern-
ment, law and technology. The general white public still does not realize
this, but during the New Negro movement of the 1920’s there developed
something of an appreciation for modified African music and art. One
white anthropologist, Melville J. Herskovits, has recently rendered yeo-
man service to the Negro History propagandists. He has not only made
excellent field studies of certain African and West Indian Negro groups,
but has written a general book to glorify African culture generally and to
show how it has survived in the American Negro community. He has
avowedly done this to give the Negro confidence in himself and to give the
white man less ^^reason” to have race prejudice.
To give the Negro an appreciation of his past is to endow him with the con-
fidence in his own position in this country and in the world which he must have,
and which he can best attain when he has available a foundation of scientific fact
concerning the ancestral cultures of Africa and the survivals of Africanisms in the
New World. And it must again be emphasized that when such a body of fact, solidly
grounded, is established, a ferment must follow which, when this information is
diffused over the population as a whole, will influence opinion in general concerning
Negro abilities and potentialities, and thus contribute to a lessening of interracial
tensions.^^
Aside from the question of admiring their past achievements, Negroes
are faced with the question of whether they should attempt to build morale
by glorifying their present achievements or attempt to raise standards by
criticizing the present low ones. Almost all Negroes, at least among the
youth, are agreed that some of the traits for which they are praised by
Southern whites (loyalty, tractability, happy-go-luckiness) are not the traits
of which they should be primarily proud.^* But there are other alleged
Negro traits that white men praise which present more of a dilemma to
Negroes. These are the so-called special Negro aptitudes for music, art,
poetry and the dance. Not only have jazz, the blues, and tap-dancing cap-
tured the popular entertainment world, but spirituals have been adjudged
“America’s only folk music,” and a few Negro actors, singers and poets
have been counted among the best. In certain branches of sports, too,
Negroes have come out on top. Because of white applause, Negroes can
take heart in these achievements and can use them to protest against
discrimination.
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