Washington Negroes
Stern, Laurence
Washington Negroes Dusk at the Mountain, by Haynes Johnson. Doubleday. 273 pp. $4.50 Reviewed by Laurence Stern "Tt is difficult," writes Haynes Johnson, "to write with objectivity about the...
...For this reason alone it is welcome...
...4.50 Reviewed by Laurence Stern "Tt is difficult," writes Haynes Johnson, "to write with objectivity about the Negro, for in the end all racial relationships are personal...
...Listen to the mother of seven illegitimate children on the city welfare dole speak of casual fornication...
...What is missing is the all-important interaction between the brain and the viscera before the fingers hit the keys...
...Hear the frankly bigoted Dixiecrat who rules Washington's legislative roost on Capitol Hill...
...As a reporter, Johnson has done a good-hearted, chaste, conscientious job of fact-gathering...
...A lot of cheap nonsense has been published in recent months about Washington and its Negro problem...
...that they are barred from suburbia and middle class employment...
...Meet the status-hungry, upper crust Negro who lives in splendid alienation from his own heritage and the white world he covets...
...Johnson's book is neither cheap nor nonsensical but serious in its objectives...
...Somehow this mosaic of disembodied conversa-, tions never seems to pull together, perhaps because the author's voice is largely absent from the babel...
...Johnson tells us these things with the thoroughness of a good reporter who might have been sent out to cover a plane crash, a fire, or a murder...
...Many anonymous voices whisper through the pages of this book on Washington's Negroes—anonymous, the author insists, so that his subjects may speak out candidly...
...The reader is given the benefit of Johnson's superb note-taking...
...Yet what is so disturbing about this book is its tone of virginal objectivity, its failure to give birth to a point of view...
...The bibliography attests to it...
...But— one way or the other—one does expect the author to lay it on the line once freed of the meddlesome restraints of copy desks, editors, and ever-twitching front-office counsel...
...We might not expect to find this quality in a newspaper series, such as the one that inspired Dusk at the Mountain...
...He interviews the cops, the survivors, the eyewitnesses, and puts it all down on his note pad...
...But he ends up telling us what we should already know if we have had our eyes and ears open—that Negroes in Washington (or for that matter any major city) are victims of double prices and credit extortion whether in shoes or shelter...
...that they are expropriated rather than helped by urban renewal projects intended to redeem their environment...
...An enormous amount of personal interviewing, reading, and patient legwork has gone into the making of his book...
Vol. 27 • July 1963 • No. 7
