JOURNAL ENTRY
Brown, Lloyd L.
JOURNAL ENTRY Lloyd L. Brown A Closet Negro Comes Out Back when Woodrow Wilson was President and I was in second grade, my elders told me that if any of the white kids at school called me a...
...This year, I am supposed to say I am an African American...
...On all Army documents during my three years, three months, three weeks, and three days of service, I was back to my childhood status of being "colored...
...But in the next decade, almost overnight, "Negro" became a bad word and "Black" was in...
...That change did not last long...
...As W.E.B...
...After putting a check after "Negro" on my draft card's list of five "races" (White first, of course, then Negro, Oriental, Indian, and Filipino), the registrar glanced at me to see what he should check for "Complexion...
...As Professor Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recently observed in The New York Times, "We will know we have achieved equality and mutual respect when names for minorities stay put...
...Along with a man's name and serial number, he had to be designated as either "White" ("W") or "Colored" ("COL...
...Lloyd L. Brown, a writer in New York City, has been a labor organizer and managing editor of New Masses...
...But each superficial new identity is short-lived...
...Reading down, the spectrum was "Sallow, Light, Ruddy, Dark, Freckled, Light brown, Dark brown, Black...
...Returning to civilian life and moving to New York, I was dismayed to find I had not left "COL" in the Army...
...In 1940, when I registered for the prewar draft, my racial designation was crucial, since the armed forces were segregated...
...His 1951 novel, "Iron City," has lust been reissued by Northeastern University Press...
...Racism, like the bite of a rabid animal, can infect a victim with the deadly disease of its madness...
...No good," said the Motor Vehicles clerk, stabbing a finger at the omission...
...Indeed, to Garvey, all blacks in the Americas and Africa were one people, and all 400 million of them, he insisted, were Negroes...
...Except when behind the wheel, I could go back to being Negro again and celebrate Negro History Week, listen to Paul Robeson's Negro spirituals, lift my voice in the Negro anthem, and become a founding member of A. Philip Randolph's Negro American Labor Council...
...As a teenager in the 1920s, I decided to be a "Negro," responding to what was called the New Negro Movement among a notable group of writers, artists, and musicians, mostly based in Harlem, who felt that the term "colored" was much too colorless and did not express racial pride...
...Next came "African-American," which was soon denounced by black nationalists as linking blacks too closely with "Euro-Americans...
...Furthermore, a movement is under way in some college-level Black Studies programs to remove the word "American" entirely and have us all termed "Africans...
...The New York application for a driver's license had a space for "Color," but I left that blank...
...Next year, who knows...
...As with the Army, it had to be one of two colors, and so I was a "COL" driver for my next ten years...
...Whatever the black minority is called, we are far and away more American than most people in the United States...
...A change in name is easy, and the white folks couldn't care less...
...To me, it made no sense to switch from the Spanish word for that color to an Indo-European synonym, but I had to keep quiet and become a closet Negro...
...Du Bois noted, "Before the Pilgrims landed, we were here...
...Malcolm X denounced all "so-called Negroes" as being Uncle Toms— he had evidently never heard of Marcus Garvey—and the young militants who advocated Black Power helped achieve the rhetorical revolution...
...The consensus designation at the moment is "African [no hyphen] American...
...He checked me as "Light brown...
...In the Army, one's tint did not matter...
...Every year during Black History Month, Americans are reminded of the noble dream of Martin Luther King Jr...
...More of us need to ponder the question posed by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred...
...JOURNAL ENTRY Lloyd L. Brown A Closet Negro Comes Out Back when Woodrow Wilson was President and I was in second grade, my elders told me that if any of the white kids at school called me a "nigger," I was to say, "I'm colored and proud of it...
...Now, some four-score years and fourteen Presidents later, that answer and several other later designations for my people are no longer deemed proper...
...Just as my generation had dumped "colored" for "Negro," this later generation followed the same pattern, replacing "Negro" with "Black...
...Marcus Garvey's black nationalist organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which shared little else with the black intelligentsia, also preferred "Negro...
...I wanted to ask him what range of colors I could choose from, but one dares not kid around with a Motor Vehicles clerk...
...It seems that whenever a new generation of Afro-Americans comes along and realizes that previous generations have not got rid of the perma-press racism in our social fabric, there is a rejection of their elders and their elders' ideas, and a resolve to be different...
Vol. 59 • January 1995 • No. 1
