Inside Black Skin

Nothing but a Man is a picture for people who are sick of the self-seekers and the headline-hunters who often turn the civil rights movement into a political sideshow. With impressive insight and objectivity, it goes straight to the heart of the matter: in a clear and simple story it describes what life is like for an average Negro in America.

The time is the present, the scene is a small town in the deep South. The hero (Ivan Dixon) is a young Negro--too proud to truckle, too smart to fight--who is working as a section hand on the railroad and pretending he doesn't really want to live the way the white folks do. He never knew his father, he hasn't seen his bastard son for at least two years, and he can't see why he should get stuck with a black family as well as a black skin. Then one day he meets a pretty schoolteacher (Abbey Lincoln), daughter of the town's principal Negro preacher. They fall in love, and against all his self-defensive instincts the hero asks her to marry him.

They rent a reasonably clean little cottage, and he goes to work in a local sawmill. He tries hard to keep his face shut, but he can't stand to "act the nigger." In private he advises the other millhands to stand up to the white man--if need be, to organize a union. He is fired. His father-in-law eventually wangles him a job in a filling station, but a few days later the white vigilantes warn his employer that the station will be wrecked if "that nigger ain't gone--and damn soon." In fury and frustration, the hero roughs up his wife and cuts out for Birmingham. There he finds his father, a malevolent old derelict, and in him sees what he himself will some day surely be--unless he stands up and fights for his right to work and raise a family in peace.

Made for a mere $230,000 by two young TV documentarists (Michael Roemer and Robert Young), Man is a polemic that does not preach. To begin with, it is careful to state that the black man is no black angel. The hero, played by Actor Dixon with a knowing mixture of shrewdness and spontaneity, is courageous but confused, decent but primitive. When he brags that he is "runnin' free," he really means he is running away from the Negro he is and secretly despises; when the white man bullies him, he hates it so much he turns right around and bullies his own wife. For their part, the Southern whites are not depicted as white devils. Some of them are obviously the salt of the earth, and the rest are tolerantly explained as normal men who have acquired abnormal power--and simply cannot handle it.

The ghastly reality of the Birmingham slums, the miraculous reality that sensibility and humor somehow survive in them, the luminous reality of the Negro language as it is spoken in the South: all are set forth with force and sincerity. But what the film most effectively conveys is the anguishing reality of how it feels to be inside the skin of an American Negro. It feels, if the hero's experience is the general one, as if the 14th Amendment had not been psychologically ratified. "The white men!" the hero rages in despair. "They get inside you and you can't stop them! They reach right into you with their damn white hands and turn you on and off!"

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