Viewing page 70 of 102

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

Freedomways Fourth Quarter 1966

boys (1965) are not listed at all. Richard Wright's Black Boy is listed as published in 1937. Parts of this book were published in 1937, 1942 and 1944. But the book as a whole was first published in 1945. The three dates were taken as dates for editions. J.A. Rogers's Africa's Gift to America (1959, 1961) is not here. Rogers is not known. Richard B. Moore's The Name Negro: Its Origin and Evil Use (1960) is missing here also. The name controversy has loomed very large among Black Muslims and other nationalists during the period covered here. Compiler Miller knows nothing about this.
The short biography section is very poor. There are three times as many biographies and autobiographies of Negroes for the period May 1954-August 1965 as the compiler lists. Paul Robeson's Here I Stand (1958) is left out. In fact, Robeson is not listed. Hugh Mulzac's A Star To Steer By (1963), Harry Golden's Mr. Kennedy and the Negroes (1965), Harvey Wish's The Negro Since Emancipation (1964), E. Frederick Morrow's Black Man in the White House (1963), the other two books by Negroes about working in the White House by Alonzo Fields and Lillian R. Parks and published in 1961, the many biographies and autobiographies of great Negro athletes, musicians and many others are all omitted. Incidentally, the compiler lists James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man under biography; she does not know that the book is fiction.
The "Literature and Folkore" section is pretty good although there are too many shallow, inconsequential novels by whites about Negroes listed here. And why does the white writer Richard M. Dorson have five folklore entries while Hughes and Bontemp's comprehensive The Book of Negro Folkore (1958) is left out? There is also nothing here by Mary E. Vroman, Lorenz Graham, Frank Yerby and Clarence Cooper. Alice Childress's Like One of the Family (1956) is missing too.
The "Tools for Further Research" listing is very useful although the notes on the Index to Selected Periodicals (now published by G. K. Hall), Quarterly Review of Higher Education Among Negroes (ceased publication several years ago) and the Journal of Intergroup Relations (published infrequently) have been copied from old, out-of-date sources.
This biography says in toto that the Negro in the U.S. is mostly a problem in all of the important areas of American life: housing, education, employment, social life, etc. There is something here on the Negro's U.S. history (no African history at all; one book on the slave trade), some biography, material on community life, leaders and

366