Divided Within

The recent rioting in Detroit between Negroes, who were peacefully moving into their new government homes, and their white attackers is a shameful example of how many Americans, on the one hand paying lip service to the anti-fascist cause are, on the other, committing crimes worthy only of a sadistic Japanese soldier. Negro defense workers and their families, after several postponements and one refusal, were finally given permission to move into a government housing project built originally for them. On the day of the moving, the Negroes planned to celebrate. But there was no celebration. It was stolen from them along with their rights as American citizens. Standing four square to prevent them from taking over the project were over six hundred angry, hostile whites backed by a riot squad armed with tear gas, clubs, and guns--the same weapons that so fondly are coddled by fascist thugs for similar occasions.

The cry of the white Detroiters was that they didn't want Negroes living near them. Their, community was too respectable to allow in such undesirables. In other words, it seems to be quite all right to rant against the Nazis' cruelty of forcing Jews into squalid, European ghettos, but it's nothing at all to whet the old knives, arm yourselves with heavy stones, muster an overwhelming majority of supporters, and then forcibly drive hated Negroes back into their equally-bad American slums. Those Detroit citizens, who scorn the Nazi theory of racial superiority, are at the same time hypocritically and vainly picturing themselves as members of a superior race. They think their "stock" is too good to live near darker-skinned citizens. And to back up their feelings of racial superiority they are supported by the arm of the law. It was the whites who broke the peace and began the riot, but it was the Negroes who paid for it in blood and humiliation. Of the 38 persons critically injured, 33 were Negroes. Of the 104 persons locked in jail, 101 were Negroes. At home, the arm of the law saw to it that the theory of race superiority was kept intact, while abroad the Army fights to crush such ideas.

If not enough Americans are willing to carry out the amount of democracy they advocate and fight for, the future won't hold much for their sons and grandsons. For no nation with a split personality can expect a great and glorious growth, and no nation "divided against itself" can expect to stand for long.