ABSTRACT

The blues was conceived of by freedmen and ex-slaves—if not as a result of a personal or intellectual experience, at least as an emotional confirmation of, and reaction to, the way in which most Negroes were still forced to exist in the United States. The blues impulse was a psychological correlative that obscured the most extreme ideas of assimilation for most Negroes, and made any notion of the complete abandonment of the traditional black culture an unrealizable possibility. In a sense, the middle-class spirit could not take root among most Negroes because they sensed the final fantasy involved. Besides the pay check, which was the aspect of American society that created a modern black middle class, was [ … ] also available to what some of my mother’s friends would refer to as “low-type coons.” And these “coons” would always be unavailable both socially and culturally to any talk of assimilation from white man or black. The Negro middle class, always an exaggeration of its white model, could include the professional men and educators, but after the move north it also included men who worked in factories and as an added dig, “sportsmen,” i.e., gamblers and numbers people. The idea of Negro “society,” as E. Franklin Frazier pointed out, is based only on acquisition, which, as it turns out, makes the formation of a completely parochial meta-society impossible. Numbers bankers often make as much money as doctors and thereby are part of the Negro “society.” And even if the more formal (“socially responsible”) Negro middle class wanted to become simply white Americans, they were during the late twenties and thirties a swelling minority.