Word: negroness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Polite Rebuff. While several major denominations have acknowledged the injustices suffered by the American Negro and have stepped up their contributions to black causes, they have not besieged Forman personally with offerings of cash. The United Presbyterian Church invited him to address its General Assembly last month, but pointedly took issue with his manifesto's threat of violence to obtain compensation from the churches. Even before the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church rejected the demands, Presiding Bishop John E. Hines called Forman's manifesto "calculatedly revolutionary, Marxist, inflammatory, anti-Semitic and anti-Christian." The Forman plan, added...
...Negro successfully robs a bank instead of a chicken coop we can honestly claim to be emancipated." The speaker is a character in this flawed but forceful first novel. The scene is a Southern city in the 1930s. For the Negroes who dwell there in remorseless squalor, a measure of freedom and manhood can be earned only by breaking the white man's law. For a bright, ambitious Negro, the best way to prosperity is not through business or the professions but in the illicit sporting life: gambling and the rackets...
Seizing on these seemingly immutable truths, two itinerant Negro waiters named Dave Greene and Blueboy Harris make themselves rich by setting up a thriving numbers bank in the city's ghetto. Like so many other aspects of the black world, the numbers operation is an inverted form of a white institution, the solid local business community. It, too, boosts the economy and shapes the ghetto's social and political structure. For the author, a former waiter, it further serves as an arena for playing off characters who embody multiple visions of the Negro destiny...
Moral Search. Dave, the numbers king, is a forebear of today's black radicals, a sort of "new Negro" whose drive for power and respectability is born of pride, anger and an awareness of his heritage. At best, his racket can bring him power only at the cost of respectability, and even that power is sharply circumscribed...
...characters closest to him seems to have found a partial solution. His partner, Blueboy, a shrewd, gamy con man, will play whatever role the whites expect of him with a comic and cynical flourish. His mistress, Kelly Sims, a college-educated chemist, bravely but quixotically banks her hopes for Negro progress on intellect. His eventual wife, Lila, a wise but unlettered country girl, has the "black granite" endurance that was once popularly thought to be the essential quality of the Negro race...