“Color, Communism and Common Sense”
March 27, 2022
“THE Communists try to exploit these national, racial and religious differences in order to weaken, undermine and subjugate America to Moscow. Like a serpent, they use guile to seduce each group. At no time have the Communists even hinted or suggested to any group, other than the Negro, that their clannishness or tendency to colonize a given area creates a “Ghetto” or “Quarters.” Were they to do so, they would be jeered out of each section as crackpots.
“Evidently the reds had international propaganda in mind when they described Negro sections as “Ghettos” because the definition of the word Ghetto in no way applies to a Negro section any more than it does to a German, Irish, Jewish, Chinese or any other section in America.
“The Encyclopedia Britannica states:
Ghetto, formerly the street or quarter of a city in which Jews were compelled to live, enclosed by walls and gates which were locked each night. The term is now used loosely of any locality in a city or country where Jews congregate.
During the Middle Ages the Jews were forbidden to leave the ghetto after sunset when the gates were locked, and they were also imprisoned on Sundays and all Christian holy days.
“Negroes band together in sections like other races and national groups much for the same reasons. Like other racial and national groups, they can buy land, build communities, settle in any section of the country. Like other racial and national groups, they can make their sections as nice and attractive as possible. The maximum business, cultural, sanitary and social services are within their reach as with other groups.
“The Communists, through propaganda, have sold a number of Negro intellectuals the idea that the Negro section is a ghetto; that white Americans created it, set its geographical boundaries; that it is the product of race hate and the inhumanity of white Americans. Therefore, it is a struggle of Negro against “white oppressors” for emancipation.
“Naturally, those holding such views have no community pride, no interest in doing anything to improve its services because that would be aiding and abetting “segregation” and maintenance of the ‘ghetto.'”
— Color, Communism, and Common Sense, Manning Johnson (1958)
