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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Footnotes - Chapter 43 - Chapter 44
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Footnotes 1431
Factors in the Development of Negro Social Institutions in the United States,” The
Americanr Journal of Sociology [November, 1934]» p. 336.)
Drake, “The Negro Church and Associations in Chicago,” p. 440.
Chapter 44. Uon4nstitutional Asfacts of the Negro Community
^ Negro spokesmen have glorified the Negro’s ability to enjoy life and have found
in it a means of group survival. James Weldon Johnson long ago said:
“These people talked and laughed without restraint. In fact, they talked straight from
their lungs and laughed from the pits of their stomachs. And this hearty laughter was
often justified by the droll humour of some remark. 1 paused long enough to hear one
man say to another: ‘W’at’s de mattah wid you an’ yo’ fr’en’ Sam?’ and the other came
back like a flash: ‘Ma fr’en’? He ma fr’en’? Man! I’d go to his funeral jes’ de same as
I’d go to a minstrel show.’ 1 have since learned that this ability to laugh heartily is, in
part, the salvation of the American Negro; it does much to keep him from going the
way of the Indian.” {^he Autobiografhy of an Ex^Coloured Man [1927^ first edition,
1912], p. 56.)
More recently, W. E. B. Du Bois has claimed:
“This race has the greatest of the gifts of God, laughter. It dances and sings: it is
humble; it longs to learn; it loves men; it loves women. It is frankly, baldly, deliciously
human in an artificial and hypocritical land. If you will hear men laugh, go to Guinea,
‘Black Bottom,’ ‘Niggertown,’ Harlem. If you want to feel humor too exquisite and
subtle for translation, sit invisibly among a gang of Negro workers. The white world
has its gibes and cruel caricatures; it has its loud guffaws; but to the black world alone
belongs the delicious chuckle. . . . We are the supermen who sit idly by and laugh and
look at civilization. We, who frankly want the bodies of our mates and conjure no
blush to our bronze cheeks when we own it. We, who exalt the Lynched above the
Lyncher, and the Worker above the Owner, and the Crucified above Imperial Rome.”
{Dusk of Dawn [1940], pp. 148-149.)
^ “The death of Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner proved long since to the Negro
the present hopelessness of physical defense. Political defense is becoming less and less
available, and economic defense is still only partly effective. But there is a patent defense
at hand,—the defense of deception and flattery, of cajoling and lying. It is the same
defense which the Jews of the Middle Age used and which left its stamp on their
character for centuries. To-day the young Negro of the South who would succeed
cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted
to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults
with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive personal
advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real aspirations must be
guarded in whispers; he must not criticize, he must not complain. Patience, humility,
and adroitness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and cour-
age. With this sacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some
prosperity. Without this there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is this situation peculiar
to the southern United States,—is it not rather the only method by which undeveloped
races have gained the right to share modern culture? The price of culture is a Lie.”
(W. E, B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk [1903], pp. 204-205.)
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