Negro Authors and White Publishers

Negro writers, like all writing folks, have many things to complain about. Writers have always felt and many of them have plainly said that the world did not fully appreciate their work. This attitude has seldom been justified. The great or good writers who have not been acknowledged as such by the generation in which they lived are rare. And where such acknowledgement has not been accorded by the generations which touched an author’s life, posterity has hardly ever revoked the unfavorable judgment. Nevertheless, writers have many good reasons for complaining; for their lot is a hard one. And it may be that Negro writers have some special good reasons for complaining; I am not sure that at the present time this is so. However that may be, there is one complaint that some younger Negro writers are uttering with greater and greater insistence which I do not think is based on the facts and which reacts to the injury of the writers uttering it. This complaint is: that the leading white publishers have set a standard which Negro writers must conform to or go unpublished; that the standard calls only for books depicting the Negro in a manner which tends to degrade him in the eyes of the world; that only books about the so-called lower types of Negroes and lower phases of Negro life find consideration and acceptance.

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