Volume 1, Number 3 · September 26, 1963
Overcome
By William Styron
American Negro Slave Revolts
by Herbert Aptheker
International Publishers, 409 pp., $5.50
Among the many humiliations of the American Negro, not the least burdensome has been the various characterizations he has had to undergo in the eyes of the white man. It is hardly an ex-aggeration to say that before World War II It the predominant image of the Negro was that of the New Yorker cover of around 1935, which in a cartoon by Rea Irvin depicted a rotund and very black man in the act of chicken thievery: against a background of midnight blue the chickens are squawking their panic while the Negro, pop-eyed and comically aghast, tries vainly to shush them with a finger held against his blubbery lips. This caricature of the Negro as a pilfering but likeable scalawag was dominant from slave days until the early 1940's, and one is bemused by the fact that it appeared on the cover of the same magazine which this year published James Baldwin's now celebrated essay. Since that New Yorker cover, of course, reaction has set in with a vengeance. Yet though the situation has virtually reversed itself, the characterizations—the caricatures—persist. With the help of sociology and anthropology and hipster romanticism, Stepin Fetchit has been transformed into a sexual carnivore of superhuman capacities. The New Yorker cover was thoughtless and vapid enough—even though a fair reflection of the times—but the concept of 'the white Negro' is equally preposterous; both arise from an imaginary notion of Negro life, both are lampoons and vulgarizations, and both are products of wish fulfillment.
Review, 1196 words
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