The Negro Question In The United States.
By James S. Allen. 203 pp. New York.
International Publishers. #2.

By James Weldon Johnson.

The element of interest in this book would not be diminished if
the first of its ten chapters were omitted. This is not to say that
those chapters contain nothing of value, but that what they contain
has already been well said many times before. Those first chapters are
devoted to a study of the economics of the plantation system of the
Black Belt of the South and the effects upon the Negro. The author
furnishes an overwhelming array of statistics gathered from an exhaus-
tive analysis of the figures of the United States census. As a result
he has assembled a large amount of data and arranged them in tables
that cannot, so far as this reviewer knows, be found elsewhere.

The first half of the book shows painstaking study and research.
Whoever reads it will, to say the least, be reviewing an informing
presentaionsof the history, the conditions, and the consequences to
the Negro of sharecropping in the cotton states. A penetrating obser-
vation, one, however, that has frequently been made, is that Emancipa-
tion left the Negroes of the plantation in practically the same econom-
ic situation that they occupied as slaves. The author clearly shows
that the sharecropping system is in all essentials a prolongation of
the slave system.

This, it may be said, he has done with an overlaboration of sta-
tistics. The pages are heavily sprinkled with decimal percentages, all
of which are used to substantiate the fact that the Negro sharecropper
is an exploited class, working under conditions that constitute actual
peonage. The fact that the Negro sharecropper is a semi-slave hardly
requires such minute mathematical buttressing. Mr. Allen approches and
analyzes this question in the light of Communism, and so, as results
from following through any monistic theory, he refuses or fails to

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consider a number of the factors involved. He ignores all of them except the economic factor or bends them to conform to his thesis. He bolsters up his thesis but weakens the value of his survey by failing to compare the condition of the white sharecropper with that of the black sharecropper.

Chapter VI., "Southern Industrialization And The Black Belt," and Chapter VII., "Northern Industry And The Black Belt," are particularly valuable and interesting because they deal with vital situations that have not already been extensively written about. Chapter VIII. is on "The Negro Bourgeoisie." All that needs be said about it is that the Negro bourgeoisie fares no better at Mr. Allen's hands that would any other socioeconomic class of bourgeois.

The meat of the book and its main interest, however, are contained in Chapter IX. For Mr. Allen has not only made a survey of the Negro question in the United States, he has also come forward with a solution of the problem. The solution is set forth under the heading, "The Right of Self-Determination." What does the author mean by the right of self-determination? In the book is a zigzag and tortuous diagram which embraces a territory termed "The Black Belt." The northern end of this territory begins just south of Washington; niches a small corner from Maryland; spreads out and includes a broad slice from the eastern part of Virginia, taking in the cities of Richmond and Norfolk; narrows to a twisting neck through North Carolina east of Durham and south of Charlotte; covers practically the whole of South Carolina; runs a corridor down through Georgia which takes in Augusta, Macon and Savannah, skirting Atlanta on the south and jutting into north Florida; continues the corridor through Alabama in a zone south of Birmingham and north of Mobile but embracing Montgomery; broadens into a hammerhead that takes in Memphis on the north and New Orleans on the south; shoves a narrow nose along the upper edge of Louisiana, and pokes it for a short dis-

Allen's *Negro Question*

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tance into Arkansas and Texas.

in

Mr. Allen has figured that/this territory 50.3 per cent of the
population consists of Negroes, and concludes that they are entitled
to self-determination and can realize it. This he puts forward as not
only the logical solution of the Negro question but as a feasible one.
How does he propose that this shall be brought about? I quote from the
author: "Any one seriously concerned with the perspectives of the prole-
tarian revolution--not as a chimera, but as a reality--must recognize
Negro
the oppressed/people as a powerful supplementary and even initiating
force. This is true in the North as well as in the South. But the
plantation South has all the prerequisites for providing a 'Peasant
War' as ally of the proletarian revolution." And further, "The highest
political expression of the fulfillment of the democratic revolution
in the South is the creation of the Negro Republic in the area approx-
imating the present Black Belt." Just what will be the attitude and
action of the 49.7 per cent of whites in the Black Belt while the Ne-
groes are engaged in a revolution to seize portions of a dozen states
along with the first and second capitals of the late Confederacy in
order to set up an independent republic the author does not indicate.
Nor does he appear to contemplate that the Federal Government would
be particularly interested in the matter. He does, nevertheless, pose
this rational question: "The most crucial test of freedom would arise
in the relationship between the Negro Republic and the United States
as a whole."

This solution, to use the mildest form applicable, is fantastic.
To any one familiar with the situation beyond mere population percent-
ages it is impracticable, impossible. I might add that to any one west
of Moscow it ought to be absurd. For those who may have doubts as to
the author's sanity it should be said that his dream visions the Negro
Republic as the first in the U.S.S.R. of America.

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The concluding chapter is, "A Reply to Critics." The notes to this chapter cite fifteen quotations in support/and two against the plan. The two against are from Norman Thomas, Of the fifteen quoted in support of the plan, ten are from Lenin, two from Stalin, two from Joshua Kunitz, and one from A. Rysakoff.

The book is clearly written and free of all Communist jargon.