Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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None did so more self-consciously than Walter White, who was born in Atlanta in 1893 and served as Executive Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1931 until his death in 1955. White’s 1948 autobiography A Man Called White begins with a classic drama of social inequality. Titling his first chapter “I Learn What I Am,” he describes his experience of the terrible Atlanta race riot of 1906, when he was thirteen years old. He claims to have gained a “great awareness” of himself as “a Negro” when he aimed a shotgun at a white mob that was about to burn down his family’s home (11). Although gunfire from a neighboring building quickly scattered the advancing mob, this sense of self-recognition lingered. White says his identity as “a Negro” was “all just a feeling then, inarticulate and melancholy.” But it was a reassuring feeling “in the way that death and sleep are reassuring”: immutable, unshakeable, something he would cling to for the rest of his life (12).