Front matter
Reading edition
Transcriber’s Note:
The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
“What a self-conscious people your Negroes are!” a recent French visitor exclaimed. He was right. The Negro lives constantly on two planes of awareness. Watching the telecast of a boxing match between Ezzard Charles, the Negro who happened to be heavyweight champion, and a white challenger, a friend of mine said, “I don’t like Charles as a person but I’ve got to root for him to beat this white boy—and good.”
One’s heart is sickened at the realization of the primal energy that goes undeflected and unrefined into the sheer business of living as a Negro in the United States—in any one of the United States.
J. Saunders Redding has also written:
TO MAKE A POET BLACK
NO DAY OF TRIUMPH
STRANGER AND ALONE
THEY CAME IN CHAINS
READING FOR WRITING (A college text with Ivan E. Taylor)
AN AMERICAN IN INDIA
LONESOME ROAD
Charter Books represent a new venture in publishing. They offer at paperback prices a set of modern masterworks, printed on high quality paper with sewn bindings in hardback size and format.
ON BEING NEGRO IN AMERICA
J. Saunders Redding
Charter Books
Copyright 1951 by J. Saunders Redding
All rights reserved
Bobbs-Merrill hardcover edition published September 1951
Charter edition published August 1962
This book is the complete text of the hardcover edition
Printed in the U.S.A.
CHARTER BOOKS
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