Dingy Storyteller

Monday, May. 24, 1943
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Still graver, says McWilliams, is the effect of color discrimination on U.S. friends and allies in Asia, the Pacific, South America. "It is unthinkable," said the Manila Times in 1930, protesting a proposed exclusion bill, "that the American flag should fly over the Philippines while the citizens who look to it for defense and support are barred from entering the United States." McWilliams thinks that "there are many evidences of a growing sense of solidarity between American Negroes and the peoples of India." Says McWilliams: the Good Neighbor policy can hardly be taken seriously by South Americans resentful of North American race discrimination. And finally, the U.S. attitude on discrimination becomes "a fulcrum on which the Axis propaganda levers can be placed to exert pressures in multiple directions."

The Solution. McWilliams' solution is as simple and drastic as a bog-oak shillelagh, as controversial as a Donnybrook Fair. "The nation now possesses," he says, ". . . the will and the physical unity and the power to achieve what it should have achieved 50 years ago—total democracy in the United States." Congress must enact a "new Federal civil-rights statute." It must outlaw the poll tax in Federal elections and "Jim Crowism on all types of interstate carriers." It must pass a "Federal anti-lynching statute." To implement this policy, it must use the bludgeon of hard cash. All Government grants to states and communities, both for war and postwar industries, housing developments, down to "every concern from which the Government purchases so much as a lead pencil," must be made on the "condition of non-discrimination." The teeth in the contract: "In default of compliance, the license can be revoked."

As for the Japanese now in Government custody, we must realize, says McWilliams, that by rooting them out of "Little Tokyos" in three states we have helped to break the influence of the Issei (first generation) on the Nisei (second generation). McWilliams agrees with Milton Eisenhower (former director of the War Relocation Authority) that "from 80% to 85% of the Nisei are loyal to the United States." They must be treated accordingly.

In regard to all colored immigrants, "every vestige of racism should be removed from . . . our naturalization and immigration policies." All Orientals living in the U.S. should be made eligible for naturalization; immigration quotas should be set up for all nationalities "on a basis of absolute equality." The issue must be seen as a worldwide one, for our problem of colored minorities "is merely a reproduction on a miniature scale of a set of similar problems which will be faced by whatever federation of powers ... emerges from this war. . . . These problems are not 'solved' merely by the declaration that 'imperialism' must be banished from the postwar world. By taking the initiative here, we might be in a position to assert real world leadership in relation to these same problems after the war. On the other hand, by continuing an ostrichlike, do-nothing policy at home, we are certainly inviting another Versailles."