On Being Negro in America

by J. Saunders Redding

"This is personal. I would call it a 'document' except that the word has overtones of something official, vested and final. But I have been clothed with no authority to speak for others, and what I have to say can be final only for myself. I hasten to say this at the start, for I remember my anger at the effrontery of one who a few years ago undertook to speak for me and twelve million others. I concurred with practically nothing he said. This was not important in itself, but when one presumes to speak for me he must reflect my mind so accurately that I find no source of disagreement with him. To do this, he must be either a lack-brain parrot or a god. Though there are many lack-brains, historic and present circumstances prove that there are no gods dealing with the problem of race—or, as dangerous to the American ideal and as exhausting to individual Americans as it has been for three hundred years, it would have been settled long ago. Else the gods are singularly perverse."

J. Saunders Redding (1906-1988) was an African American author and educator. In 1970, Redding became the first African American professor at Cornell University's College of Arts and Sciences and then retired in 1975. His brother was Louis L. Redding, a prominent lawyer and civil rights advocate from Wilmington, Delaware who challenged the school segregation in the Brown v. Board of Education case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Genres: African American

109 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 18, 2020

About the author

A graduate of Brown University, James Thomas Saunders Redding was an academic and historian who taught at Hampton Institute, Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., and Morehouse College in Atlanta before finishing his career at Cornell University.

Reviews

[Bill on GR Sabbatical · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hope this piece will stand as the epilogue to whatever contribution I have made to the “literature of race.” I want to get on to other things. I do not know whether I can make this clear, but the obligations imposed by race on the average educated or talented Negro (if this sounds immodest, it must) are vast and become at last onerous. I am tired of giving up my creative initiative to these demands.

J. Saunders Redding, son of two Howard University graduates, pursued a distinguished academic career across the years from the Great Depression into the mid-1970s, becoming the first African-American to hold the rank of professor in Cornell University's College of Arts & Sciences and the first to hold an endowed chair there. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. called him "the veritable dean of Afro-American literary critics." As an integrationist and critic of Black Nationalism, his work fell into obscurity after his death, but appears to be receiving renewed interest.

This lengthy essay cum memoir is among his most important writings and it provides a fascinating insight into his own journey from a comfortable childhood in Wilmington, Delaware up through 1951, when he was teaching at Hampton Institute in Virginia. Sadly, when Redding died in 1988, he was disillusioned and the novel he'd started in 1959, which he thought would secure his literary legacy, sat unfinished in a desk drawer.

I have to say I find it intriguing that, among the millions of ratings and reviews on Goodreads, mine are the first for this work.

[K.D. Johnson]

He speaks from personal experience on a variety of subjects relative to the Black experience, i.e., Democracy, religion, integration, middle classism, marriage between the races, integration of Blacks into the American culture. But what stuck out most was his query of the desire to be White in a white world. As well as the idiocy of the reality of God. And that man does not practice the teachings of God especially as it relates to relationship between the races.
It would do the reader well to remember that this book was published in 1951, before the integration of schools and existence of overt racism.
He considers this writing as a scholarly essay which is intertwined with personal ancedotes. It is a read that requires careful attention and forces the reader to ask questions of his own attitudes and beliefs.