Rare, indeed, is the Harlem citizen, from the most circumspect church member to the most shiftless adolescent, who does not have a long tale to tell of police incompetence, injustice, or brutality.
I myself have witnessed and endured it more than once.
The businessmen and racketeers also have a story.
And so do the prostitutes.
(And this is not, perhaps, the place to discuss Harlem's very complex attitude toward black policemen, nor the reasons, according to Harlem, that they are nearly all downtown.
)

It is hard, on the other hand, to blame the policeman, blank, good-natured, thoughtless, and insuperably innocent, for being such a perfect representative of the people he serves.
He, too, believes in good intentions and is astounded and offended when they are not taken for the deed.
He has never, himself, done anything for which to be hated -- which of us has?
-- and yet he is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it.
There is no way for him not to know it: there are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
He moves through Harlem, therefore, like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country;
which is precisely what, and where, he is, and is the reason he walks in twos and threes.
And he is not the only one who knows why he is always in company: the people who are watching him know why, too.
Any street meeting, sacred or secular, which he and his colleagues uneasily cover has as its explicit or implicit burden the cruelty and injustice of the white domination.
And these days, of course, in terms increasingly vivid and jubilant, it speaks of the end of that domination.
The white policeman standing on a Harlem street corner finds himself at the very center of the revolution now occurring in the world.
He is not prepared for it -- naturally, nobody is -- and, what is possibly much more to the point, he is exposed, as few white people are, to the anguish of the black people around him.
Even if he is gifted with the merest mustard grain of imagination, something must seep in.
He cannot avoid observing that some of the children, in spite of their color, remind him of children he has known and loved, perhaps even of his own children.
He knows that he certainly does not want his children living this way.
He can retreat from his uneasiness in only one direction: into a callousness which very shortly becomes second nature.
He becomes more callous, the population becomes more hostile, the situation grows more tense, and the police force is increased.
One day, to everyone's astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.
Before the dust has settled or the blood congealed, editorials, speeches, and civil-rights commissions are loud in the land, demanding to know what happened.
What happened is that Negroes want to be treated like men.

Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement, containing only seven words.
People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable.
The idea seems to threaten profound, barely conscious assumptions.
A kind of panic paralyzes their features, as though they found themselves trapped on the edge of a steep place.
I once tried to describe to a very well-known American intellectual the conditions among Negroes in the South.
My recital disturbed him and made him indignant;
and he asked me in perfect innocence, "Why don't all the Negroes in the South move North"?
I tried to explain what has happened, unfailingly, whenever a significant body of Negroes move North.
They do not escape Jim Crow: they merely encounter another, not-less-deadly variety.
They do not move to Chicago, they move to the South Side;
they do not move to New York, they move to Harlem.
The pressure within the ghetto causes the ghetto walls to expand, and this expansion is always violent.
White people hold the line as long as they can, and in as many ways as they can, from verbal intimidation to physical violence.
But inevitably the border which has divided the ghetto from the rest of the world falls into the hands of the ghetto.
The white people fall back bitterly before the black horde;
the landlords make a tidy profit by raising the rent, chopping up the rooms, and all but dispensing with the upkeep;
and what has once been a neighborhood turns into a "turf".
This is precisely what happened when the Puerto Ricans arrived in their thousands -- and the bitterness thus caused is, as I write, being fought out all up and down those streets.

Northerners indulge in an extremely dangerous luxury.
They seem to feel that because they fought on the right side during the Civil War, and won, they have earned the right merely to deplore what is going on in the South, without taking any responsibility for it;
and that they can ignore what is happening in Northern cities because what is happening in Little Rock or Birmingham is worse.
Well, in the first place, it is not possible for anyone who has not endured both to know which is "worse".
I know Negroes who prefer the South and white Southerners, because "At least there, you haven't got to play any guessing games"!
The guessing games referred to have driven more than one Negro into the narcotics ward, the madhouse, or the river.
I know another Negro, a man very dear to me, who says, with conviction and with truth, "The spirit of the South is the spirit of America".
He was born in the North and did his military training in the South.
He did not, as far as I can gather, find the South "worse";
he found it, if anything, all too familiar.
In the second place, though, even if Birmingham is worse, no doubt Johannesburg, South Africa, beats it by several miles, and Buchenwald was one of the worst things that ever happened in the entire history of the world.
The world has never lacked for horrifying examples;
but I do not believe that these examples are meant to be used as justification for our own crimes.
This perpetual justification empties the heart of all human feeling.
The emptier our hearts become, the greater will be our crimes.
Thirdly, the South is not merely an embarrassingly backward region, but a part of this country, and what happens there concerns every one of us.

As far as the color problem is concerned, there is but one great difference between the Southern white and the Northerner: the Southerner remembers, historically and in his own psyche, a kind of Eden in which he loved black people and they loved him.
Historically, the flaming sword laid across this Eden is the Civil War.
Personally, it is the Southerner's sexual coming of age, when, without any warning, unbreakable taboos are set up between himself and his past.
Everything, thereafter, is permitted him except the love he remembers and has never ceased to need.
The resulting, indescribable torment affects every Southern mind and is the basis of the Southern hysteria.

None of this is true for the Northerner.
Negroes represent nothing to him personally, except, perhaps, the dangers of carnality.
He never sees Negroes.
Southerners see them all the time.
Northerners never think about them whereas Southerners are never really thinking of anything else.
Negroes are, therefore, ignored in the North and are under surveillance in the South, and suffer hideously in both places.
Neither the Southerner nor the Northerner is able to look on the Negro simply as a man.
It seems to be indispensable to the national self-esteem that the Negro be considered either as a kind of ward (in which case we are told how many Negroes, comparatively, bought Cadillacs last year and how few, comparatively, were lynched), or as a victim (in which case we are promised that he will never vote in our assemblies or go to school with our kids).
They are two sides of the same coin and the South will not change -- cannot change -- until the North changes.
The country will not change until it re-examines itself and discovers what it really means by freedom.
In the meantime, generations keep being born, bitterness is increased by incompetence, pride, and folly, and the world shrinks around us.

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.
Walk through the streets of Harlem and see what we, this nation, have become.

4.

East River, downtown: postscript to a letter from Harlem

the fact that American Negroes rioted in the U.N. while Adlai Stevenson was addressing the Assembly shocked and baffled most white Americans.
Stevenson's speech, and the spectacular disturbance in the gallery, were both touched off by the death, in Katanga, the day before, of Patrice Lumumba.
Stevenson stated, in the course of his address, that the United States was "against" colonialism.
God knows what the African nations, who hold 25 per cent of the voting stock in the U.N. were thinking -- they may, for example, have been thinking of the U.S. abstention when the vote on Algerian freedom was before the Assembly -- but I think I have a fairly accurate notion of what the Negroes in the gallery were thinking.
I had intended to be there myself.
It was my first reaction upon hearing of Lumumba's death.
I was curious about the impact of this political assassination on Negroes in Harlem, for Lumumba had -- has -- captured the popular imagination there.
I was curious to know if Lumumba's death, which is surely among the most sinister of recent events, would elicit from "our" side anything more than the usual, well-meaning rhetoric.
And I was curious about the African reaction.

However, the chaos on my desk prevented my being in the U.N. gallery.
Had I been there, I, too, in the eyes of most Americans, would have been merely a pawn in the hands of the Communists.
The climate and the events of the last decade, and the steady pressure of the "cold" war, have given Americans yet another means of avoiding self-examination, and so it has been decided that the riots were "Communist" inspired.
Nor was it long, naturally, before prominent Negroes rushed forward to assure the republic that the U.N. rioters do not represent the real feeling of the Negro community.

According, then, to what I take to be the prevailing view, these rioters were merely a handful of irresponsible, Stalinist-corrupted provocateurs.

I find this view amazing.
It is a view which even a minimal effort at observation would immediately contradict.
One has only, for example, to walk through Harlem and ask oneself two questions.
The first question is: Would I like to live here?
And the second question is: Why don't those who now live here move out?
The answer to both questions is immediately obvious.
Unless one takes refuge in the theory -- however disguised -- that Negroes are, somehow, different from white people, I do not see how one can escape the conclusion that the Negro's status in this country is not only a cruel injustice but a grave national liability.

Now, I do not doubt that, among the people at the U.N. that day, there were Stalinist and professional revolutionists acting out of the most cynical motives.
Wherever there is great social discontent, these people are, sooner or later, to be found.
Their presence is not as frightening as the discontent which creates their opportunity.
What I find appalling -- and really dangerous -- is the American assumption that the Negro is so contented with his lot here that only the cynical agents of a foreign power can rouse him to protest.
It is a notion which contains a gratuitous insult, implying, as it does, that Negroes can make no move unless they are manipulated.