Class Conflict

Many an upper-class, conservative Negro, embracing the doctrine that the white man is superior to the black, accepts Nordic standards, regrets his dusky hue, shapes his life toward proving that his soul, at least, is white or near-white. More radical Negroes, notably the younger school of Negro writers, resent the assumption of white superiority, feel that black culture is different from but on an equal plane with white, maintain that the future of the colored race lies in its proudly being as black as it is painted.

Thus readers of the Pittsburgh Courier (famed Negro Weekly) read last week an article by Author Langston Hughes, bitterly assailing those members of his race whom he considers a pale reflection of white civilization. Meeting upper-level Negroes of Washington, D. C., Mr. Hughes found them critical of Jean Toomer, Rudolph Fisher and Zora Hurston, Negro novelists, of many another Negro author who has written realistic, often tragic narratives of the Negro masses. "Why doesn't Jean Toomer write about nice people?" asked the Washingtonians. Why didn't Rudolph Fisher's City of Refuge* deal with "decent folks"? And they objected to Negro Artist Winold Reiss's drawings of Negroes because he "made his colored people look so colored." Of the whole radical school of young Negro authors they said, pityingly, disapprovingly: "Lord help these bad New Negroes."

To which Author Hughes made venomous reply: To those who objected that Artist Reiss had pictured colored schoolteachers in regrettably dark tints he replied: "Should all teachers resemble the high-yellow ladies dominating the Washington school system?" Of the upper-crust Negroes as a class he observed: "Many of the so-called best Negroes are in a sort of nouveau riche class, so from the snobbishness of their positions they hold the false belief that if the stories of Fisher were only about better class people they would be better stories." As to these "best" Negroes' complaint that their lives are not made the subject of Negro literature, Mr. Hughes thought that they were fortunate in being neglected. For, said he, a "really powerful" story would expose "their pseudo culture, their slavish devotion to Nordic standards, their snobbishness, their detachment from the Negro masses and their vast sense of importance to themselves. . . . [Such a book] would be more wrathfully damned than Nigger Heaven/- at present vibrating throughout the land in its eleventh edition."

Author Hughes is well qualified to speak for the "bad New Negroes," being himself prominent among them. Though still a student at Lincoln University, he has already published two books of poems, The Weary Blues and Fine Clothes to the Jew. Readers of the Pittsburgh Courier looked forward to its next issue in which Mr. Hughes was to continue his criticism of Negroes who "still think that white people are better than colored people."

*Published in the conservative Atlantic Monthly.

/-By Author Carl Van Vechten, Caucasian, who took up Negroes as an esthetic fad, then pictured them as depraved, in a book full of Harlem dives, dope peddlers, degenerates.