Volume 7, Number 2 · August 18, 1966
People Without a Country
By I.F. Stone
The Negro American
edited by Talcott Parsons, edited by Kenneth B. Clark
Houghton Mifflin, 781 pp., $9.50
Some truths are too terrible to be uttered. They lead nowhere but to despair. They subvert hope, the ultimate pillar of the social order. We prefer to cast about for assuaging myths. One such truth, which goes back to Heraclitus, the founder of the dialectic, is that conflict is the essence of life, that 'war'—in his own dark phrase—is 'the father of all things.' It is not a maxim on which to found a society for eternal peace. Another such truth casts its shadow over the civil rights movement. All kinds of insights, concepts, and hypotheses are trotted out and tested in the 750 pages of the huge symposium, The Negro American, except the one which seems to me the most fundamental of all. The confusion, frustration, and despair of the civil rights movement become comprehensible if one looks at the American Negro (a less hopeful but more accurate description) simply as a people without a country.
Review, 3495 words
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