It was in his role as a preacher that my father had most contact with the Negroes of Lansing

　　It was in his role as a preacher that my father had most contact with the Negroes of Lansing. Believeme when I tell you that those Negroes were in bad shape then. They are still in bad shape-though in adifferent way. By that I mean that I don't know a town with a higher percentage of complacent andmisguided so-called "middle-class" Negroes-the typical status-symbol-oriented, integration-seekingtype of Negroes. Just recently, I was standing in a lobby at the United Nations talking with an Africanambassador and his wife, when a Negro came up to me and said, "You know me?" I was a littleembarrassed because I thought he was someone I should remember. It turned out that he was one ofthose bragging, self-satisfied, "middle-class" Lansing Negroes. I wasn't ingratiated. He was the typewho would never have been associated with Africa, until the fad of having African friends became astatus-symbol for "middle-class" Negroes.
　　Back when I was growing up, the "successful" Lansing Negroes were such as waiters and bootblacks.
　　To be a janitor at some downtown store was to be highly respected. The real "elite," the "big shots," the"voices of the race," were the waiters at the Lansing Country Club and the shoeshine boys at the statecapitol. The only Negroes who really had any money were the ones in the numbers racket, or who ranthe gambling houses, or who in some other way lived parasitically off the poorest ones, who were themasses. No Negroes were hired then by Lansing's big Oldsmobile plant, or the Reo plant. (Do youremember the Reo? It was manufactured in Lansing, and R. E. Olds, the man after whom it wasnamed, also lived in Lansing. When the war came along, they hired some Negro janitors.) The bulk ofthe Negroes were either on Welfare, or W.P.A., or they starved.
　　The day was to come when our family was so poor that we would eat the hole out of a doughnut; butat that time we were much better off than most town Negroes. The reason was that we raised much ofour own food out there in the country where we were. We were much better off than the townNegroes who would shout, as my father preached, for the pie-in-the-sky and their heaven in thehereafter while the white man had his here on earth.
　　 I knew that the collections my father got for his preaching were mainly what fed and clothed us, andhe also did other odd jobs, but still the image of him that made me proudest was his crusading andmilitant campaigning with the words of Marcus Garvey. As young as I was then, I knew from what Ioverheard that my father was saying something that made him a "tough" man. I remember an oldlady, grinning and saying to my father, "You're scaring these white folks to death!"One of the reasons I've always felt that my father favored me was that to the best of my remembrance,it was only me that he sometimes took with him to the Garvey U.N.I.A. meetings which he heldquietly in different people's homes. There were never more than a few people at any one time-twentyat most. But that was a lot, packed into someone's living room. I noticed how differently they all acted,although sometimes they were the same people who jumped and shouted in church. But in thesemeetings both they and my father were more intense, more intelligent and down to earth. It made mefeel the same way.