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FREEDOMWAYS    FOURTH QUARTER 1966

Erwin W. Welsch, the author of The Negro in the United States: A Research Guide, is reference and liaison librarian in history at Indiana University. The objectives of this research guide are good: to provide what has been needed for a long time—a brief, critical, useful introduction to and bibliographical survey of writing about the Negro in virtually all of the fields of Negro studies: history, sociology, biography, anthropology, Negro institutions, civil rights, segregation, Negro protest and the Negro in the various art fields. Also to persuade students and concerned citizens to read widely on Negro problems, assimilate facts and form their own opinions on the basis of reliable information.

Such a work as this, to be definitive, should be undertaken by a scholar who has written widely and been steeped in Negro studies over a period of 25 or 30 years. This should be a kind of culmination of a life's work in the field. Erwin Welsch, with little or no background in the field, has read widely and done his best with some help from others. But the project is too ambitious for the author, and the results are only fair. The essays are eclectic, uncritical and too brief to have depth. The errors of omission and commission are too numerous. Welsch knows nothing of the critical periodical writing on Kardiner and Ovesey's The Mark of Oppression; one looks in vain for C. G. Woodson's The Mind of the Negro, W. Z. Foster's The Negro People in American History and Louis Ruchames's The Abolitionists or his John Brown Reader.

Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. does not lack a biography, as Welsch says. His autobiography Against the Tide was published in 1938; he is also treated in Ben Richardson's Great American Negroes ((1945, 1956). The critical periodical writing on S. M. Elkins's Slavery by E. D. Genovese and Howard N. Meyer in Science and Society and The Commonweal, respectively, is unknown to Welsch. Herbert Aptheker's American Negro Slave Revolts, the most definitive in the field and a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, is described as factual but echoing the Communist Party line. Salk lists 23 books and articles in his section on Negro slave revolts. Welsch mentions one book. Welsch misses the real thesis of Larry Gara's The Liberty Line which is the same as J. C. Furnas's in Goodbye to Uncle Tom, namely, that there was no organized Underground Railroad at all; just a little spontaneous aid to the slaves here and there. Welsch does leave out Furnas's two books mentioned above. But he also leaves out all of the works of J. A. Rogers and James S. Allen, Aptheker's Essays in the History of the American Negro, To Be Free, Toward Negro Free-

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