On Being Negro in America. J. Saunders Redding
- Тип: Текст
- Автор:
- Издательство: Bookwire(2020)
- ISBN: 4064066398453
- Язык: Английский
- Описание
- Фрагмент
"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.
