DN8

Reflections on Lyle Saxon, Irene Douglass, and the Wall of Race

December 10, 1943

I sat there thinking just how the fortunes of white people changed so quickly for the better, but not so with the majority of Negroes. Somewhere along the line bitter reactionary whites had builded up a wall to exclude the Negro from all of the good things of life. Thereafter a form of heartless exploitation went on. 

 But all white people were not satisfied with this. Some were dissatisfied in a speechless, apologetic, defensive sort of way, others wanted to do something about it. Especially so when they found out at one time or another, that the people on the other side of the wall were as nice and as human and as aspiring and as normal as they. But the wall had been built so well and with so much hate that it was impossible for these to break through it without paying a penalty for it. Some did not care what the penalty. Some found themselves in a sort of undertow in the other directions and the sensation was so pleasant that they did not worry to care what the price. 

He was thinking of Saxon who wanted to see him, and whom he could not see unless he went up a freight elevator. 

He was thinking of Irene [Douglas] whom the wall of hate had shut from his life, but who had come back, being unable to stay away any longer, but found the chasm across which they must reach each other now grown even wider than before. 

Then there was Eunice, and Gloria, and Elis, and Lena, and the poor white man who asked him for carfare one day, and Silverman, and Myron, and Lauglin, and nearly a score of others who had stood dumb and silent at the wall, wishing to climb, but fearing the penalty that one must eventually pay in the South for being simply human. 

He poured the hot water into the Ovaltine and milk, went into the bedroom to the fire and sat down and began to eat. As he walked from the cold kitchen and went into the warmer bedroom, he cried out like a man uttering a prophetic warning: "O beloved Southland, you torture your black children, but your white children too sink to the earth because of the terrible blows that you rain upon them!"

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