A Unique Tract for Our Times:
RORTY, JAMES
A Unique Tract for Our Times Now Is the Time. By Lillian Smith. Viking. 120 pp. $2.00. Reviewed by James Rorty Author, "His Master's Voice," "Tomorrow's Food"; co-author, "McCarthy and the...
...Smith has learned to give her hecklers from the lecture platform...
...In Coming Issues A. A. BERLE JR.: The Public Philosophy by WALTER LIPPMANN QUINCY HOWE: Two Minutes Till Midnight by ELMER DAVIS...
...She has written a superb tract which should be circulated by the hundreds of thousands wherever de-segregation is in progress...
...Taking as her point of departure the cold war and the powerful weapon which racial discrimination in America gives to the Communists, Mrs...
...Dedication has taught her to understand both the friends and the foes of Negro emancipation...
...co-author, "McCarthy and the Communists" SINCE no one else could have written so excellent an educational pamphlet on school de-segregation, it is indeed fortunate that Lillian Smith has essayed the task...
...Smith sketches the history of the slave trade, of colonialism, and of segregation in the South...
...Her little book is written quite without heat, but with a quiet, moving eloquence that is calculated if not to persuade, at least to disarm, the most obdurate white-supremacist...
...As Faulkner so passionately insists, a Northerner like the writer —or like most of the Supreme Court Justices—could be wrong...
...it was a necessary armistice between the races that has lasted much too long, until it now corrodes the hearts and minds of both blacks and whites...
...For anyone who wants to know what the Nobel Prize-winner thought about the race problem as late as 1948, the page references for the Signet edition are 160-65 and 185-86...
...All the important questions are there, including "Would you want your daughter to marry a Negro...
...For example: "When people talk to you about 'the Negro,' ask them which Negro they are speaking about...
...Somehow, Mrs...
...Smith suffers from no such handicaps...
...The latter she describes as arising out of the violence of the Reconstruction period...
...In a section entitled "There Are Things to Do and Things to Say," Mrs...
...Smith succeeds in giving intelligent answers to all of them without evading or affronting the questioner...
...The book is equipped with an excellent bibliography, which wisely includes William Faulkner's Intruder in the Dust...
...The last section, and perhaps the most useful, lists the gentle answers which Mrs...
...Yet, on the basis of these passages I hazard the guess that Faulkner, who could be counted on personally to resist injustice to a Negro in any situation, had not then sufficiently outgrown his ancestral fear and moral isolation from the Negro to know and accept him as an adult, spiritually autonomous person...
...Smith makes a number of sensible suggestions for the promotion of interracial understanding, some of them designed to deflate the moral and intellectual pretensions of prejudice...
Vol. 38 • March 1955 • No. 11
