Dusk at the Mountain : the Negro the nation and the capital: a report on problems and progress.

Washington, D.C. is the only city in America with a Negro majority. Here the problems of the American Negro are magnified, distorted, ignored, or solved under the eyes of Congress and the world. And here, though they num ber 54% of the population, Negroes claim little power, but plenty of en emies - enemies like the segregation ists who ridicule the enforcement of civil rights in our capital city, the landlords who make a killing by rent ing cramped slum quarters to large families, the storekeepers who make tempting offers of credit to buy over priced goods, the unions who consist ently refuse apprenticeships. And the Negro has enemies enough within his own ranks-cheaters who abuse the welfare system, criminals, "Uncle Toms," fanatical demagogues-all of whom destroy the good standing he tries to build up.

In order to write this report Haynes Johnson, an experienced newspaper man, promised not to reveal names and thus obtained interviews with hun dreds of Negroes. He takes the reader to a slum where a mother is supporting seven illegitimate children; to the home of a rich man seeking status symbols; to the offices of shrewd Negro. leaders; to Howard University, with its strange mixture of African and Ameri can students; to Bates Street (Wash ington's Catfish Row); to hair-raising Black Muslim meetings. White men are quoted as well-politicians, police men, social workers, union leaders, some of whom want to help and some of whom want to hinder those who are trying, one hundred years after Abra ham Lincoln's Emancipation Procla mation, to solve this country's biggest

social problem. This is a subject on which a reporter cannot be wholly objective, for race relations are a personal matter; the re sult is not pleasant reading, but it is an honest account of what a white man learned about his colored fellow Americans. DUSK AT THE MOUNTAIN has a significance that goes a long way beyond Washington, D.C.