St. Paul recorder. [volume] (St. Paul, Minn.) 1934-2000, 1943-05-14

| ting a bucket OF cold water In the
face. There is hardly a white man
alive-whether a product of the
Emerson tradition and the aboli-
ZIONIST soil Of Harvard, or whether
of the Mississippi Delta-who is
not a rudy sahib in his heart. II
we get to understand this fact
about ourselves, we can disarm it.
It would do many a Southerner
and many a South-hating Yankee
sahib a lot Of good to take a look
at the Negro press. They won't get
their accustomed Difference in the
Negro press. The Negro writers,
over and over, in all possible
variations, with a variety Of tones
and shadings, with none Of the
ambiguous and deceitful language
by which hard facts are softened
in the white press, tell the Negro
exactly what the white man Is do
ing for him and to him. It is not a
bad thing for a white man to see
how he looks through Negro eyes,
and it is even better for him to try
to understand why it is so.
In his first two columns on the
Negro press printed about a year
ago, Pegler, the great foul-blow
artist of our time, even criticized
the race press because it derived
much of its advertising income
from rackets like magic-powder
companies, purveyors Of love
secrets, Observation-Disclosures and race
books. Where would be have them
go for their income? Negro pur-
chasing power is low and the press
simply cannot get high-grade ad-
vertising. It takes what it can get.
The white press has passed through
the same phase. Pegler also found
the writing in the Negro news
papers undistinguished. If he did,
he confined himself to police-court
stories. But probably he only
SKINNED through a few papers be-
fore writing his article. His state
ments were so unfair and vulnera-
BILE that he reopened the subject in
q later column, took some Of it
back in effect, and gave the Negro
people a few encouraging pats on
the back. But the knitting had done
real damage, and set off a whole
train of critical articles.
The best writing in the Negro
press is found in the numerous
signed columns which all of the
papers feature; the next best in
the unsigned editorials. The news
stories are not literature, but they
are very often vivid with the hard,
lean structure which is one of the
few virtues news story can have
as form Of writing. Some of
them are sloppy. Their editorializ-
ing is open and frank, when it &C.
ours, which is pretty frequently.
Editorializing in white newspapers
is more subtle, but it occurs just
as constantly.
\ These columnists are fighting for
Negro equality; they are fighting
the white people who oppose it and
the Negroes who show no heart for
the fight. In some Of their COL
umns, fierceness is apparent in
every sentence. In others it lies
beneath a calm and subtle prose,
and sometimes dullness. The white
reader will not find dullness very
often. Almost everything in the
Negro press will be new to him, or
if not new, written in a strange
new key. Sometimes these column
nists are inaccurate with facts and
careless in their attitudes. But the
white reader must be careful about
what he allows to anger him, for
there is vast amount of raw, solid
fact which they handle well within
the bounds of accuracy, and which
the white reader simply has got to
gulp down and let it educate him.
There is one flavor of the white
press fortunately absent from the
Negro: the dreary, pedestrian writ
ing of men who are bored with
their jobs. There are a lot of white
columnists and reporters who are
drawing pay today on writing they
did in the 1920s, and their weari-
ness is inescapable. The white
reader doesn't find this WEAKNESS
in the Negro columnists. They live
and write at the beginning of a
new era for their people, and they
are swept along by it.
In my opinion, George S. Schuy-
Ter, who writes in The Pittsburgh
Courier, is about the best. He is
a clear and vivid writer. Some
times he writes with a mordant
sarcasm, but he does not let it un-
balance the order of his ideas. And
he hammers what seems to me the
soundest line of all: that the Ne
gro's natural friend, and natural
ally, is the white worker, and that
the two should strive for unity of
purpose in the labor movement.
Critics of the race press fail to
mention the better conduct cam
paigns. Those who can gloss over
this effort Of Negro writer's to arm
their people with the tools of NOR
atty and dignity are prejudiced in
deed. Week after week papers like
The Pittsburgh Courier and The
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