New World a-Coming

BY sticking to first-rate reporting and description, Roi Ottley has brought off a study of “Black America” with somewhat more success than the more sociologicallyminded writers in this field seem able to achieve. For racism is essentially a problem of human emotions, and in Mr. Ottley’s book the Negro is not a statistic or an abstraction but a wonderfully mixed and varied collection of men and women, merchants, politicians, evangelists, publicists, educators, and agitators. A native New Yorker, the author has drawn on Harlem for most of the lively example and documentation of his book, and the result is a useful appraisal of urban Negro affairs in any large center. His good sense and good temper provide the needed explanations for the phenomena which he recounts. He tells us what the Negro wants and why he expects to get it. Mr. Ottley proposes no panacea. He poses the question and leaves it in the belief that, contrived by the white majority, it is not to be settled by a dictum from the black minority.