Outside in narrow, noisy Macdougal Street the four of us
stood. Mrs. Robeson, alert, intelligent, merry, an expert
chemist for years in one of New York's leading hospitals;
Paul Robeson, clad now in conventional tweeds in place of the
ornate, gold-laced trappings of the Emperor Jones; my wife
and I. We wanted supper and a place to talk. All about us
blinked invitingly the lights of restaurants and inns of New
York's Bohemia. Place after place was suggested and discarded. Here a colored man and his companion had been
made to wait interminably until, disgusted, they had left.
There a party of four colored people, all university graduates,
had been told flatly by the proprietress, late of North Carolina,
she did not serve "niggers.” At another, other colored people
had been stared at so rudely they had bolted their food and
left in confusion. The Civil Rights Act of New York would
have protected us —but we were too much under the spell of
the theater we had just quitted to want to insist on the rights
the law gave us. So we mounted a bus and rode seven miles
or more to colored Harlem where we could be served with
food without fear of insult or contumely. The man whose art
had brought homage to his feet from sophisticated New York
could not enter even the cheapest of the eating places of lower
New York with the assurance that some unpleasantness might
not come to him before he left.
What does race prejudice do to the inner man of him who is the victim of that prejudice? What is the feeling within the breasts of the Paul Robesons, the Roland Hayes's, the Harry Burleighs, as they listen to the applause of those whose kind receive them as artists but refuse to accept them as men? It is of this inner conflict of the black man in America—or, more specifically in New York City, I shall try to speak.
I approach my task with reluctance—it is no easy matter to picture that effect which race or color prejudice has on the Negro of fineness of soul who is its victim. Of wounds to the flesh it is easy to speak. It is not difficult to tell of lynchings and injustices and race proscription. Of wounds to the spirit which are a thousand times more deadly and cruel it is impossible to tell in entirety. On the one hand lies the Scylla
