Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART ONE HISTORY, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE AMERICAN WAY
- 1 Race Progress and Exemplary Biography
- 2 Reading Riot
- 3 Rendezvous with Modernism, Fascism – and Democracy
- 4 “If I Were a Negro”
- PART TWO DECOMPOSING UNITIES, DECONSTRUCTING NATIONAL NARRATIVES
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
4 - “If I Were a Negro”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- PART ONE HISTORY, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE AMERICAN WAY
- 1 Race Progress and Exemplary Biography
- 2 Reading Riot
- 3 Rendezvous with Modernism, Fascism – and Democracy
- 4 “If I Were a Negro”
- PART TWO DECOMPOSING UNITIES, DECONSTRUCTING NATIONAL NARRATIVES
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Summary
Liberals like people with their heads, radicals like people with both their heads and their hearts. Liberals talk passionately of the rights of minority groups; protest against the denial of political and voting rights, against segregation, against anti-Semitism, and against all other inhuman practices of humanity. However, when these same liberals emerge from their meetings, rallies, and passage of resolutions and find themselves seated next to a Negro in a public conveyance they tend to shrink back slightly. … Intellectually they subscribe to all of the principles of the American Revolution and the Constitution of the United States, but in their hearts they do not. They are a strange breed of hybrids who have radical minds and conservative hearts. They really like people only with their heads.
– Saul Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals (1946b: 19–20)In January 1968, for Fortune magazine's special issue on “the urban crisis,” John H. Johnson recalled his quintessentially American, rags-to-riches saga. A visit to the 1933 Chicago World's Fair convinced the young Johnson and his mother to move from rural Arkansas to Chicago's South Side. In 1936 Johnson, an honors student at Du Sable High School, spoke at the annual convocation on “America's Challenge to Youth,” was heard by Harry Pace, the president of a local insurance company, and was awarded a scholarship to the University of Chicago as well as part-time employment at the Supreme Life Insurance Company.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Writing America BlackRace Rhetoric and the Public Sphere, pp. 89 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998