When Negroes looked for the second phase, the realization of equality, they found that many of their white allies had quietly disappeared. . . . To stay murder is not the same thing as to ordain brotherhood.
To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business-not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything is flaking away into. . . rhetoric and plot.