buy a loaf of bread, a hazard.
A collection of twelve hundred dollars was taken up among the department-store employees and the members of the police force. The policeman who had fired the fatal shot gave one hundred dollars and got his picture in the papers. The owners of the department store gave two hundred dollars more.
And this too seemed more degrading than charitable. If this was what his father’s life was worth to all these people, a Negro’s life was nothing. He had once read where a pedigreed dog was worth more actual money and held in higher esteem. For the first time bitterness came into his life. He lost all ambition. Why try to be somebody in a world where he resembled a criminal and was valued at less than a pedigreed dog? But afterwards it served as a spur to his ambition. He would prove that he was worth more than that. He might never become important, but at least he would make white people give him more consideration than they had given his father. He made a vow he would pass beneath the earth no common shade.
With the fifteen hundred dollars donated for his father’s death, he entered the University of California at Los Angeles. In many respects he found college but a repetition of the grammar school in Pasadena on a higher level. But he went prepared for the lack of Negro recognition in American education, and he expected no honor for himself. At home his mother was finding it difficult to make ends meet. To help pay his way Lee washed dishes and waited table in the white fraternity houses.
On the whole, his college life was not unpleasant. He kept away from where he was not wanted, and had a few companions among the students, both Negro and white. The Negro students had activities among ‘themselves, and a Negro fraternity was represented. But Lee did not have the time or money it required to take part. He lived just beyond the edge of social life, concentrating on his studies.
After his first year he majored in sociology. His greatest interest was in the how and why of people—what it was in some that gave them a sense of superiority, and what was lacking in others that contributed to this feeling of inadequacy. And though he learned much about the sources and the causes, he never learned about the logic of it.
The most unpleasant thing that happened to him occurred at a lecture on minorities in his sociology class. The young professor compared the problems of the Negro minority with the problems of the homosexual minority, contending that of the two the latter suffered the greater discrimination. Lee drew the implication that black skin was also being considered as an abnormality. This he rejected bitterly, denouncing the parallel drawn as stupid and malicious; and was asked to withdraw from the class.
He graduated in the spring of 1934. The only employment that he could find for Negro college graduates was in domestic service. This he refused to do.
The neighbors condemned him for sitting home and letting his aging mother support him by working in the white folks’ kitchens. It was then he first got on his muscle; he resented their pious judgments. He could not begin life as a domestic servant; nor did his mother want him to.
The day before that Christmas his mother died. Some said from overwork. Others said from heartbreak over seeing her son go bad.
After that the only thing that kept him going was a posed belligerence, a high-shouldered air of bravado, disdain, even arrogance. For many times he went hungry. And always he went alone.
White people found him disturbing—those to whom he applied for work he knew they would not give him. They resented his tight-faced scowl, his hot, challenging stare, his manner of pushing into an impersonal office and upsetting everyone’s disposition with the problem that he rolled in front of him, as big and vicious and alive as if it were a monster on a chain. They resented his asking for the jobs he knew he wouldn’t get. Did he think he was the
A collection of twelve hundred dollars was taken up among the department-store employees and the members of the police force. The policeman who had fired the fatal shot gave one hundred dollars and got his picture in the papers. The owners of the department store gave two hundred dollars more.
And this too seemed more degrading than charitable. If this was what his father’s life was worth to all these people, a Negro’s life was nothing. He had once read where a pedigreed dog was worth more actual money and held in higher esteem. For the first time bitterness came into his life. He lost all ambition. Why try to be somebody in a world where he resembled a criminal and was valued at less than a pedigreed dog? But afterwards it served as a spur to his ambition. He would prove that he was worth more than that. He might never become important, but at least he would make white people give him more consideration than they had given his father. He made a vow he would pass beneath the earth no common shade.
With the fifteen hundred dollars donated for his father’s death, he entered the University of California at Los Angeles. In many respects he found college but a repetition of the grammar school in Pasadena on a higher level. But he went prepared for the lack of Negro recognition in American education, and he expected no honor for himself. At home his mother was finding it difficult to make ends meet. To help pay his way Lee washed dishes and waited table in the white fraternity houses.
On the whole, his college life was not unpleasant. He kept away from where he was not wanted, and had a few companions among the students, both Negro and white. The Negro students had activities among ‘themselves, and a Negro fraternity was represented. But Lee did not have the time or money it required to take part. He lived just beyond the edge of social life, concentrating on his studies.
After his first year he majored in sociology. His greatest interest was in the how and why of people—what it was in some that gave them a sense of superiority, and what was lacking in others that contributed to this feeling of inadequacy. And though he learned much about the sources and the causes, he never learned about the logic of it.
The most unpleasant thing that happened to him occurred at a lecture on minorities in his sociology class. The young professor compared the problems of the Negro minority with the problems of the homosexual minority, contending that of the two the latter suffered the greater discrimination. Lee drew the implication that black skin was also being considered as an abnormality. This he rejected bitterly, denouncing the parallel drawn as stupid and malicious; and was asked to withdraw from the class.
He graduated in the spring of 1934. The only employment that he could find for Negro college graduates was in domestic service. This he refused to do.
The neighbors condemned him for sitting home and letting his aging mother support him by working in the white folks’ kitchens. It was then he first got on his muscle; he resented their pious judgments. He could not begin life as a domestic servant; nor did his mother want him to.
The day before that Christmas his mother died. Some said from overwork. Others said from heartbreak over seeing her son go bad.
After that the only thing that kept him going was a posed belligerence, a high-shouldered air of bravado, disdain, even arrogance. For many times he went hungry. And always he went alone.
White people found him disturbing—those to whom he applied for work he knew they would not give him. They resented his tight-faced scowl, his hot, challenging stare, his manner of pushing into an impersonal office and upsetting everyone’s disposition with the problem that he rolled in front of him, as big and vicious and alive as if it were a monster on a chain. They resented his asking for the jobs he knew he wouldn’t get. Did he think he was the
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