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The Crisis of Freedom: Toward an Interpretation of Negro Life

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

William Toll
William Toll
Affiliation:
University of Michigan
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Type
Review Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 3 , Issue 2 , December 1969 , pp. 265 - 279
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1969

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References

page 265 note 1 Frazier, E. Franklin, Black Bourgeoisie (New York, 1965), p. 234Google Scholar.

page 266 note 1 Frazier, , Black Bourgeoisie, chaps. 8–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

page 266 note 2 Frazier, E. Franklin, The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago, 1966), pp. 220, 235, 291Google Scholar.

page 266 note 3 Ibid. p. 232.

page 266 note 4 For fascinating attempts to wriggle around in this morass, see Potter, David, People of Plenty (Chicago, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Riesman, David, The Lonely Crowd (Yale, 1950)Google Scholar; Baltzell, E. Digby, The Protestant Establishment (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America (New York, 1955)Google Scholar.

page 267 note 1 Aptheker, Herbert, A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, vol. ii (New York, 1964), p. 727Google Scholar. See also DuBois, W. E. B., Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York, 1964)Google Scholar.

page 267 note 2 Destler, Chester McA., ‘Western radicalism, 1865–1901: concepts and origins’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. xxxi, no. 3, 12 1944Google Scholar; Hofstadter, Richard, ‘Introduction’ to Harvey, William H., Coin's Financial School (Cambridge, Mass., 1963)Google Scholar.

page 268 note 1 Lewis, Oscar, La Vida (New York, 1968), p. xliiiGoogle Scholar; see also Lewis, Oscar, Five Families (New York, 1959)Google Scholar. An adaptation of the ‘culture of poverty’ theory to the Negro ghetto can be found in Clark, Kenneth, Dark Ghetto (New York, 1965)Google Scholar; Hamilton, Charles and Carmichael, Stokely, Black Power (New York, 1967)Google Scholar, accept the ‘colonialism’ thesis developed by Clark as the precipitate of the ‘culture of poverty’.

page 268 note 2 The novels and essays on Harlem by James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison emphasize a very different view of life than does the sociological literature. Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land presents the best personal narrative of the impact of the urban world upon rural migrants. The same view emerges from the Autobiography of Malcolm X, despite the different political prescriptions of Malcolm X. The literature of the 19205 presents still a different view of the Negro community. See Locke, Alain (ed.), The New Negro (New York, 1968)Google Scholar; Langston Hughes, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander; Johnson, James Weldon, Black Manhattan (New York, 1968)Google Scholar.

page 269 note 1 Handlin, Oscar, Fire-ball in the Night (Boston, 1964)Google Scholar and Race and Nationality in American Life (New York, 1956)Google Scholar.

page 269 note 2 Herskovits, Melville, The Myth of the Negro Past (Boston, 1958)Google Scholar.

page 269 note 3 Park, Robert, ‘Introduction’ to Johnson, Charles S., Shadow of the Plantation (Chicago, 1934), p. xxiiiGoogle Scholar.

page 269 note 4 Ibid. p. 3.

page 269 note 5 Johnson, however, consistently emphasized the rapid changes transpiring in the rural South. See, especially, Johnson, Charles S., Growing up in the Black Belt (Chicago, 1941)Google Scholar.

page 269 note 6 Caudill, Harry, Night Comes to the Cumberlands (Boston, 1962)Google Scholar.

page 269 note 7 Johnson, Charles S., Shadow of the Plantation, p. 152Google Scholar. Evidence for a theory of cultural lag seems to be strongest among rural Negroes and early arrivals in the city. If we assume that in an industrial age most small business is itself an expression of cultural lag then Negro business life itself lags behind that of the large corporations. The same must be said, of course, of most of the business enterprises in the United States. As with marginality, the theory of cultural lag always depends on what the so-called lagging phenomenon is compared with.

page 270 note 1 DuBois, W. E. B., ‘The Negroes of Farmville, Virginia: a social study’, United States Bureau of Labor Bulletin, no. 14 (Washington, D.C., 1898), pp. 15, 21, 37Google Scholar. For an added view of Prince Edward County see Moton, Robert R., Finding a Way Out (New York, 1921), chaps. I–IVGoogle Scholar.

page 270 note 2 Miller, Kelly, ‘Surplus Negro women’, American Negro Academy Occasional Paper, no. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1897)Google Scholar.

page 270 note 3 Thorn, William Taylor, ‘The Negroes of Sandy Spring, Maryland: a social study’, United States Bureau of Labor Bulletin, no. 32, pp. 43–102 (Washington, D.C., 1901)Google Scholar; Thom, , ‘The Negroes of Litwalton, Virginia: a social study of the “Oyster Negro”’, United States Bureau of Labor Bulletin, no. 36, pp. 1115–70 (Washington, D.C., 1901)Google Scholar.

page 271 note 1 Wright, R. R. Jr, ‘The Negroes of Xenia, Ohio: a social study’, United States Bureau of Labor Bulletin, no. 48, pp. 100–44 (Washington, D.C., 09 1903)Google Scholar.

page 271 note 2 DuBois, W. E. B., The Philadelphia Negro, Publications of the University of Pennsylvania in Political Economy and Public Law, no. 14 (Philadelphia, 1899), pages 464–70Google Scholar.

page 272 note 1 Summers, Iverson, ‘A Negro Town in Illinois’, Independent, vol. xlv, 27 08 1908, pp. 464–70Google Scholar.

page 273 note 1 The American Academy of Political and Social Sciences published symposia in their Annals in igoi, 1906 and 1913. The Voice of the Negro, published in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1904 to November 1906, and then for a brief time in Chicago, printed numerous articles on urban conditions and race relations. For a fine contemporary study of urban conditions in New York City, see Ovington, Mary White, Half a Man (New York, 1911)Google Scholar.

page 273 note 2 The Philadelphia Negro makes the distinction between a study of Negro social institutions and the study of race relations without indicating the relationship between the two very clearly. This distinction has been followed by Cayton, Horace and Drake, St Clair in Black Metropolis (Chicago, 1944)Google Scholar and Myrdal, Gunner in An American Dilemma (New York, 1944)Google Scholar.

page 273 note 3 Constance Green, McLaughlin, The Secret City, A History of Race Relations in the Nation's Capital (Princeton, 1967)Google Scholar.

page 274 note 1 Osofsky, Gilbert, Harlem, the Making of a Ghetto, 1890–1930 (New York, 1966), p. 153Google Scholar.

page 274 note 2 Warner, Samuel Bass, The Private City, Philadelphia in Three Stages of Its Growth, Introduction (Philadelphia, 1968)Google Scholar.

page 274 note 3 Spear, Allan, Black Chicago, 1890–1920 (Chicago, 1967), pp. 7, 38–41, 45 and chap. 10Google Scholar. For a further discussion of the uniqueness of the Negro's social and political experience, see Vann Woodward, C., The Burden of Southern History (New York, 1961), p. 104Google Scholar, and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1956), passimGoogle Scholar.

page 274 note 4 Warner, Robert, New Haven's Negroes, A Social History (New York, 1940)Google Scholar.

page 274 note 5 Silberman, Charles, Crisis in Black and White (New York, 1964)Google Scholar, does a fine job of exploding the false assumptions upon which Myrdal operated. Silberman, however, does not seem to see that Myrdal was trying to describe a moral dilemma that existed in the ideal structure of American history rather than a prevalent social condition. Myrdal himself, however, does not make this crucial distinction clear.

page 275 note 1 Keil, Charles, Urban Blues (Chicago, 1967), p. 192Google Scholar.

page 276 note 1 Cruse, Harold, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York, 1967), pp. 52, 96–114, 188Google Scholar; Jones, Leroi, Blues People (New York, 1963)Google Scholar.

page 277 note 1 Ovington, op. cit., chaps. 3, 4, 7; Oscar Handlin, Boston's Immigrants; Hourwich, Isaac, Immigration and Labor, pp. 362–457Google Scholar; Berthoff, Roland, British Immigrants in Industrial America, pp. 88–106Google Scholar.

page 277 note 2 For an analysis of the continuing impact of migration on Negro community life see Cloward, Richard A. and Piven, Frances Fox, ‘Migration, Politics and Welfare’, Saturday Review, 16 11 1968, pp. 31–5Google Scholar.

page 277 note 3 DuBois, W. E. B., ‘The Black North: a social study’, New York Times, 17, 24 11, 4, 11, 18 12 1901Google Scholar.

page 278 note 1 Burgess, M. E., Negro Leadership in a Southern City (Chapel Hill, 1960)Google Scholar.

page 278 note 2 William Toll, ‘The Washington-DuBois Controversy, Intellectual Struggles in the Progressive Era’, MS in possession of author.