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Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement, containing only seven words.

People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable.

The idea seems to threaten profound, barely conscious assumptions.

A kind of panic paralyzes their features, as though they found themselves trapped on the edge of a steep place.

I once tried to describe to a very well-known American intellectual the conditions among Negroes in the South.

My recital disturbed him and made him indignant ; ;

and he asked me in perfect innocence, `` Why don't all the Negroes in the South move North ''??

I tried to explain what has happened, unfailingly, whenever a significant body of Negroes move North.

They do not escape Jim Crow: they merely encounter another, not-less-deadly variety.

They do not move to Chicago, they move to the South Side ; ;

they do not move to New York, they move to Harlem.

The pressure within the ghetto causes the ghetto walls to expand, and this expansion is always violent.

White people hold the line as long as they can, and in as many ways as they can, from verbal intimidation to physical violence.

But inevitably the border which has divided the ghetto from the rest of the world falls into the hands of the ghetto.

The white people fall back bitterly before the black horde ; ;

the landlords make a tidy profit by raising the rent, chopping up the rooms, and all but dispensing with the upkeep ; ;

and what has once been a neighborhood turns into a `` turf ''.

This is precisely what happened when the Puerto Ricans arrived in their thousands -- and the bitterness thus caused is, as I write, being fought out all up and down those streets.