Being somebody & Black besides An untold memoir of midcentury Black life

"One ever feels his twoness," wrote the eminent Black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois in his classic The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Du Bois was the hero, the inspiration, and the muse for George B. Nesbitt (1912--2002), a lawyer, a civil rights activist, and the author of this newly released autobiography, written decades ago but just recently published. The book opens with an unexpected surprise: an introduction by the great Black sociologist, and a contemporary of Nesbitt's, John Gibbs St. Clair Drake. St. Clair Drake was the author of Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (1945), which focused on Chicago, the city where the two men knew each other, having met after Nesbitt acquired his law degree from the University of Illinois. St. Clair Drake's introduction alone is worth the price of admission. In this poignant memoir it becomes clear that Nesbitt felt keenly the entirety of Du Bois's quotation about "twoness," as "an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder." Nesbitt was not given to writing poetically, as Du Bois was in his great classic, but one sees immediately why Nesbitt took Du Bois as his touchstone and guiding light. Both men were proud of their achievements, well educated, talented, dogged, and yet constantly subject to the vicissitudes of living as well-educated and self-respecting professional Black men in a white supremacist nation. Although Nesbitt's life was ordinary in many ways--he is at pains to point this out--it becomes extraordinary in its recounting here, the plain-spoken prosaic nature of the narrative ironically giving the story a heroic lift. Nesbitt's family came North in the early twentieth century as part of the Great Migration: the movement of more than six million Black Americans out of the South, seeking to flee the shadow of slavery and Jim Crow. His parents made the trek northward but, for reasons unknown to Nesbitt, they never made it to Chicago, instead settling in the small university town of Champaign, Illinois, "with their hopes and fears, two mules, a cow, and a flock of chickens" (p. 2). The young George got to know the town by distributing the well-known African American newspaper The Chicago Defender. The town was not rife with as much racial discrimination as in the South, but it was no paradise either. "It denied [him]," Nesbitt writes, "but it whetted [his] aspirations too" (p. 14), teaching him "not to expect too much nor to settle for too little" (p. 15). These early passages hint at the book's great quality: its straightforward prose often produces beautiful passages of insight, ironic contrast, and sometimes well-earned anger. Reflecting on his childhood, Nesbitt notes that his mother, who died young in 1947, was a devout Methodist; his father was a member of the Church of God and Saints of Christ, "a [B]lack Hebrew Israelite denomination" (p. xxxvii). Nesbitt's training in Jewish passages shows up in numerous quotations throughout the book, though as a boy he was none too happy about being stuck attending religious services on both Sundays and Saturdays. Between these two different religious communities, however, and along with the wide array of people he knew by delivering copies of the Defender, Nesbitt felt encompassed by a "chain of watchfulness" throughout his boyhood, recognizing the virtues of being watched over by people both "strict and restraining" but also at times "warm and friendly" (p. 32). As a teenager Nesbitt discovered Du Bois and never looked back. He prefaces the chapter "The Comfort of my Negroness" with another quotation from the renowned scholar's The Souls of Black Folk: "He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face" (p. 41). Nesbitt lived out that creed, making his way through university and then law school, before working as a porter on Pullman cars and later serving in various federal agencies. Altogether, this is the story of a fairly ordinary man who, by virtue of being an ambitious middle-class Black man in the mid-century United States, ended up living an extraordinary life. Nesbitt often recounts that life with humor and wit, sometimes with sadness, frequently with sarcasm and irony, and occasionally with anger at the sheer absurdities of simply going about one's business while having Black skin. As one example of his humor, Nesbitt recounts leading a group of Boy Scouts out to the countryside where they met a local farm owner who also happened to be a Klansman. Wanting to show "that the Klansmen were against Karl Marx, the Pope, and the Jews, except for Jesus, but not [Black people]" (p. 102), he initiated a playful conversation that ended with the Klansman rollicking in laughter, and the trip continuing on after a comfortable night spent on the Klansman's farm. Nesbitt's sadness comes through when he recalls law clerking on the south side of Chicago and seeing the constant roundups--what is today known as stop-and-frisk--of poor Southsiders: "something awful had somehow happened to them. I knew, of course, that they were in immediate trouble, for drunkenness, disorderly conduct, assault and battery. But the trouble seemed deeper, and the people looked bewildered and lost, mean and bitter" (p. 126). In chapter 8, "The Army and Its Apartheid," Nesbitt pulls no punches in detailing the irony of Black men fighting for the quintessential freedoms, none of which were actually afforded to them. Having been drafted and sent to train in Savannah, Georgia, he narrates his constant experiences of racial harassment in a military he thoroughly detested. In one memorable passage, he details a particular Army document meant to indoctrinate personnel into respecting the "hallowed" system of segregation. Eventually, on a ship crossing the Pacific, the color line was broken only when the white soldiers decided to share the bathrooms designated for Black soldiers out of convenience. Also during his time in the army, Nesbitt was labeled an "agitator" after a contretemps with a particularly racist colonel, prompting an investigation by an FBI agent, which turned up evidence that he sympathized with labor unions. Eventually, a psychiatrist declared Nesbitt unfit, and he was shipped home from the war "bearing a shipping tag around my neck on which [were] scrawled two words, 'Adult Maladjusted'" (p. 183). Here the anger comes through. Nesbitt's later years intersected with Martin Luther King, Jr.'s frustratingly unsuccessful 1966 campaign in Chicago, where the civil rights leader met his match in Mayor Richard Daley. The mayor used symbolic gestures to defuse the movement without actually addressing segregation in Chicago housing, schooling, and access to public services. Nesbitt continued fighting the good fight, acknowledging that his service in President John F. Kennedy's administration resulted mostly in minor gains. Even the federal government, ostensibly an integrated employer, could not really walk the walk. Nesbitt tells of how, while Jesus was denied three times by Simon Peter, "[Black people] are denied daily, not by their followers, but by those whites who profess to practice integration with them, especially on the job" (p. 227). Given these circumstances, Nesbitt ever feels his "twoness," seeing the doors of "Opportunity," as Du Bois called it, closed by those in charge of opening them. The latter part of the book describes countless daily encounters--with workmates, government officials, landlords, ordinary people, and most especially with the police--in which Black humanity confronted white supremacy; one had justice on its side, the other power. Being Somebody and Black Besides is a treasure trove for understanding twentieth-century Black American life, told in direct prose that will appeal to a wide audience. Nesbitt is not a well-known historical figure; rather, he is a member of the rank and file, but his nearly unerring ability to capture the everyday experiences of living while Black is extraordinary, and makes this a must-read book for all readers, both within and beyond academia. In Ralph Ellison's great novel Invisible Man (1952), the protagonist ends up living underground; Nesbitt refused that route, defying his very invisibility by leaving readers the great gift of this autobiography. Summing Up: Highly recommended. General readers through faculty. --Paul Harvey, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

This book is about three generations of a stable but quite undistinguished Negro family and one of its members of no greater distinction. The entire lot lacks a single celebrity; no one of its members has been acclaimed as the first Negro to have done this or that of note. It also lacks the infamous as much as the famed. To dare the writing of a book about a Negro family that is neither celebrated nor sick surely requires explanation. The effort was hardly escapable in the first instance. Not being burdened with children of my own but instead blessed with nieces and nephews who repeatedly urged me to set down for them the stories which I have from time to time told them, I have simply succumbed to their blandishments. But in more truth, it has been conversations with several adult friends of mine which persuaded me to go to work. These pressures have had their way, despite my fear that well over two decades of expressing myself within the Federal bureaucracy have left me unfitted for writing readably, if ever the facility was at all mine. Those discussions have taken this line, as I am able to reconstruct it. The stories of my telling belong more widely than to the children of my brothers. For as the urgings of my young kinsmen suggest, they are of a generation whose members grope and yearn for comfort and clarity respecting the duality of their beings as American Negroes. They reach for a sense of continuity for themselves, to better accept themselves, and to know more of their particular past for strengthening their position in the future, as is most plain in so many of younger Negroes who rather frantically seek roots in the long, long ago, and as far away as Africa. What it was like for poor Negro parents, a generation removed from slavery, to move from the rural South to the urban North, there to engage themselves and their children in incessant striving for self-esteem, respect from whites, and material well-being, is a part of that continuity. For this movement from the South has been a course steadily run by hundreds of thousands who represent both more of the plainer people of America still behaving in essentially a pioneering fashion and her darker people ever protestant against the withholding of the American promise and continuing, stubbornly to pursue it... Northbound Negro migrants have not conquered forests nor crossed a barren expanse. They have traveled a route far worse, across rough mountain and frightful morass, to sight bright rainbows beyond stretches of quicksand, and meet with posted signs which both urge them on and forbid their passing. Along their way and at the journey's end, they have encountered again and again an enemy worse than nature, an alliance of callous indifference and the nurtured evil of man against man. This has been pioneering. South to North, country to city, within the color line. Many of these travelers have made it, survived and persisted, striven and succeeded, even according to the measures for those who are allowed the easier, white ways, free of restraints. Some of those who did not faint were once pointed to in community after community, with hidden guilt and show of pride, as "the hard-working, respectable ones." But today those Negroes on the move and who prove the will and strengths of a people, those called "upwardly mobile" and "the Negro middle class," are nearly forgotten. The white community, distant and aloof, and with fear and trembling, looks upon what it has wrought in the great black ghettos of our cities and eases its guilt by seeing all caught within them as great, simple masses of helpless and hapless humanity. This is done even while elaborate means for the restoration and release of the hemmed in are proposed and somewhat implemented; while the protest and push continue, with increasingly frequent violent outbursts; while others still arrive, moving from subjugation to alien and hostile environs in search of greener pastures. Worse than being lost in the eyes of those outside the ghetto, its respectable residents are spurned and all but spat upon by the youthful activists who shout "black power" on campus and in the streets, and by would-be Negro Messiahs. These young assertive ones say that their elders woo false gods and hate themselves. They see the struggle for racial equality as something commenced only a few months ago and tag their elders as "Toms." Those institutions built by their fathers and grandfathers to carry forward the struggle are denied and disdained, despite the long proof of their capabilities. Now black power ought to be celebratory too, as white power has so long been and so patently is. Moreover, the exercise of rights and responsibilities requires a sense of identity and self-esteem. And it is good to see the rebellious young ones engage themselves in aptness of self-celebration, the resurrection of which has been long due. But the rub is that too many of the celebrants are drinking wantonly of the good medicine and having themselves a binge. They confuse ends with means and go on to make their color distinctiveness the end-all of their efforts. They would overcome white racism with black and seek race separation. By this token, they are entangled in their narcissism, seek insularity in a fluid and mobile society, and lose hold on the leverage which the American creed gives the Negro cause, while young whites and even a part of themselves reach for the goodness of life beyond abundant bread, and at the very hour when a brotherhood of plurality and equality presses for acceptance around a shrunken world. To tell the story, across three generations, of one Negro family which came and persists in the pioneering path--of thousands upon thousands--whose weary ones were never celebrated, are too little understood and now questioned, when not altogether forgotten--may be helpful in the midst of the current turbulence of Negro-white relations. In addition, though many, many are the Negroes who can truly tell stories which match and indeed excel those told here, my friends remind me that too few of such Negroes can bring themselves to tell them. They fear so to pinch themselves lest they waken from dreams more to their liking. Lastly, the time and place for these stories perhaps strengthen their character. The nineteen hundred and twenties, thirties, and forties embraced the Great Depression, which was yet longer and deeper for Negroes. In those decades "the times were hard" indeed, to test the fiber of the poor and aspirant, especially the color-burdened among them. Negro-white relations in the Midwest, the setting for most of the narratives, were awkward and tricky, in some part harsh and rigidly separate but unmarked so, thus combining the worst of the essence of the color system in the South and the nature of that more prevalent in the East and the Far West. For these reasons, then, I was persuaded to write this book.     Excerpted from Being Somebody and Black Besides: An Untold Memoir of Midcentury Black Life by George B. Nesbitt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. 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