LOST IDENTITY

...Adopting, then, what arts he could under the harsh regime of slavery, the Negro, especially through the spirituals and jazz, has given to the world perhaps our most distinctive contributions...

...it is equally clear that the fight has never embittered her...

...I should think that the Southerner feels this need more than most Americans, partly because, instead of coming slowly into the modern mechanical and industrial world, and thus losing imperceptibly his identity, he was hurled into it, stripped and shaken, after four years of bitter warfare...

...No wonder we seek our lost identity...

...It is clear that, because of race prejudice, she had to fight far harder than she would have for the heights she has gained...

...for in jazz the Negro artist speaks an international language, and the Negro's spirit, least damaged by the modern mechanical and power drive, may meet on equal terms the eager peoples of the world...

...Yet she worked faithfully, year in and year out, against half-successes and one bitter failure, but with the vision of perfection undimmed, until she reached at last the heights...

...You will find what the Negro wants: equality of opportunity and an end to indignity...

...Yet white Southerners draw a line through their own hearts and say, it is two...

...You will find that many, though not all, white Southerners believe that integration will come in time, though they may be fighting against it and though they even may be conscious that they don't really want to be fighting against it...

...And there is Marian Anderson...

...My Lord, What a Morning: An Autobiography, by Marian Anderson...

...You will find here the various reasons expressed for segregation— the list seems to me complete—including the one given by the charming lady, "But of course we have to keep the white race intact," and denied gruffly by her much older husband, "In power—in power—you mean the white race in power...

...Perhaps it is the destiny of a great artist like Marian Anderson to make us want everything...

...Her book, of course, is not as great as her voice...

...There is about her none of the hardness sometimes associated with artists...

...If Warren related the problem of the South to the national problem, Margaret Butcher weaves the culture of the Negro into the culture both of the South and of the nation...

...Stripped of their culture, the Negroes adopted, and marvelous-ly, the culture of their conquerors...

...A great artist—a voice that happens once in a century, said Toscanini—an unassuming lady, a gracious ambassador to the world at large...

...The extreme of this attitude is represented by the fear, common in the South today, that under desegregation the Negro culture will overcome the white culture...

...It may be slow," said one pastor, "but they are Christians...

...The most striking illustration of this is the shift from the typical African arts of sculpture and carving—handwork, exact, reserved, and somber— to the typical arts of the American Negro, song and dance, creations of the entire body, exuberant, emotional, and even, like the rest of the South, sentimental...

...Robert Penn Warren's book, Segregation, a part of which appeared in Life, is brief but perceptive...

...The slaves weren't permitted to keep their African culture...

...312 pp...

...the Negro culture is the American culture as shaped by a group with a distinctive American experience...

...But what would one have...

...Faced now with the challenge of desegregation, the South, so Warren believes, has a chance to achieve moral identity...

...Ralph Bunche...

...perhaps it has only deepened her humanity...

...There are too many pages of episodes, too few great scenes, too few perceptive moments perhaps, and—this may be a tribute to her modesty—too slight a sense of the difficulties she had to overcome...

...Finally, to draw two threads together: superimpose Miss Butcher's book upon Warren's, and we see, I think, what the South's trouble is: the culture of the Negro proves that the life of Negro and white in the South is essentially one...

...Reviewed by James McBride Dabbs THESE three books together give the feeling of the race situation in the South today, a large part of the background, and, in the story of Marian Anderson, a happy account of an individual Negro's achievement...

...As Warren sees for the South the possibility of an important part in our national life, so Miss Butcher sees for the Negro this possibility in our international life...

...Because of the scorn and condescension in which white Americans have held the Negro, the Negro artist finds it extremely difficult simply to accept himself as a human being unusually blessed with certain insights and abilities...

...The voice of a century and in addition the ability to explain the secret...

...How could it be...

...Viking...

...Miss Butcher is interested in showing historically what problems have arisen, especially among Negroes, because Americans as a whole have been so slow to accept as American the cultural contributions of their largest minority group, the Negroes...

...Her book represents the completion of a work which the late Alain Leroy Locke was doing at the time, of his death in 1954...

...It is the account of interviews he had on a recent trip through parts of the South...

...For, to me, one of the most striking things about her is not that unique voice—which of course the pages of the book can only suggest— but the rare balance of human being and artist...

...Yet all this has been achieved, and is achieved, against tremendous odds...

...Yet, as Miss Butcher shows, he is increasingly able to do this, both through his own immersion in the streams of art and through the growing realization of all American artists that Negro culture is an essential part of American culture...

...There is, for instance, Dr...

...Though Africans have been producing exquisite iron-work for centuries, there is no certainty that even the famous iron-work of the New Orleans gates and banisters, done by Negro craftsmen, was an African product...

...and, if it does, it may offer leadership to the nation, in which moral identity is hard to come at as we swing between complacency and panic...

...How many times did she refuse to practice because it might disturb her neighbors...

...In terms which he has used elsewhere, Warren describes this inner conflict as essentially the modern struggle to achieve identity...

...You will find, finally, that there is a real conflict in the South between white Southerners—"There's a fifth column of decency here, and it will, in the end, betray the extremists, when the politicians get through"—but that, more important even than this, as the sub-title of the book suggests, is the conflict within white Southerners, between their ideals of justice and love, and their racial attitudes...

...Such a fear, as Miss Butcher shows, has no basis...