Pearl Buck’s Important Civil Rights Legacy

1 Pearl S. Buck in the Press

In late 1932, Pearl Buck and her then-husband Lossing Buck visited the United States, in part, to receive her Pulitzer Prize for The Good Earth. On December 11, 1932, she had accepted an invitation to attend a tea hosted by the National Urban League as its guest speaker. In return, Buck agreed to write several pieces for the National Urban League’s academic journal Opportunity about race relations over the next few years. The first, “Race Relations and Race Pride,” appeared in January 1933, and it was the transcript of her talk a month earlier to the League. The remarks made it clear that the author had strong opinions about equality.

“As you know I have lived always among a race other than my own,” Buck told an audience at the YMCA in Harlem that had Black and white guests in attendance. “It has taught me not only to see and be ashamed of race arrogance in members of my own race, but I know through bitter experience what it is to suffer because others despise me for being white” (Buck 1933, “Race Relations”).

Buck recounted how she had almost lost her life, due to her race, in the 1927 riots in Nanjing. “I have had that strange and terrible experience of facing death because of my color. At those times nothing, nothing I might have done could have saved me. I could not hide my race. Some of you too may have faced death for such a cause. It happens in almost every country at some time. The only reason I was not killed was because some of the others in that race knew me, under my skin, and risked their own lives for me, and so I am here today.”

She also was very candid that the speech was the first in her life given to a mostly Black audience. Buck’s speech was soon reported in the Black national press along with an unrelated public appearance by Margaret Sanger in Harlem. The Pittsburgh Courier called them both “serious-minded whites” who had a sincere interest in looking beyond stereotypes (Calvin 1933).

In June 1933, Buck’s second contribution to Opportunity was another speech transcript, “The Road to The Future.” This time the remarks came at a farewell dinner in New York in early May 1933, as Buck was leaving the missionary service but still returning to China. Buck’s words were even more powerful and drew more attention nationally to her stance on civil rights. She asked the mostly Black audience to accept her also as a Black person during the speech because of her experience in China. “Our greatest tragedy is that this is our country. We are not foreigners here. We belong here. We have nowhere else to go” (Buck 1933, “Road to Future”).

Pearl and Lossing Buck then traveled back to China for a brief time. In March 1934, Buck’s next contribution to Opportunity dealt with a series of lynchings in America that she had learned about from the Chinese press. “A Letter from Abroad” was reprinted in at least 20 Black-owned publications (Buck 1934). “I would not be a true patriot, I think, if I were to excuse or condone in any slightest degree the incredible news which has come flashing across the cables even to this far China, of the lynchings which have taken place in my country within very recent months and even weeks,” she wrote. “Those who were lynched were my countrymen. That their race was not mine makes no difference they were my countrymen. Because they were my countrymen, they had every right, no matter what their crime, to the privileges of the laws of our land.”

“I am quite aware that there are those among my countrymen who will say I do not understand the race problem. I reply, I do understand it. I have lived my life among colored races, a white child, a white girl, a white woman with two daughters. There is no aspect of the race problem which I have not faced and completely understood.”

Over the next decade, Buck would contribute regular articles to Opportunity and serve on the National Urban League’s Board of Directors after her return to the United States. By 1938, Buck’s reputation as a national figure changed when she received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Among literary circles, her selection was controversial. But in America’s popular culture, the prize only amplified Pearl Buck’s voice as a respected national figure.

2 Buck Confronts The New York Times

Buck made two very public statements about civil rights and race prejudice in the early 1940s that received wide national attention in newspapers. The first was a 2,300-word letter to The New York Times in November 1941 that refuted a newspaper editorial about a “crimewave” in Harlem. The second was her June 5, 1942 address at Howard University. Both events were widely discussed, and the remarks were repeated in Black-owned newspapers and in the Journal of Negro Education, a scholarly publication issued by Howard University.

On November 12, 1941, the Times editorial page recommended some solutions to the rise of urban crime in an editorial titled “The Other Side of Harlem” (New York Times 1941). The nation’s most powerful newspaper stated that a recent surge in crime was not the result of a racial problem in Harlem, but more of an economic issue that could be addressed with more job opportunities for Blacks along with more police protection. Buck’s response three days later set off a public debate into December 1941, including the letter’s official recognition in the United States Senate a week after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 15, 1941.

“Your editorial of Nov. 12, ‘The Other Side of Harlem,’ denies the basic cause for the situation in our country of which the new manifestation of crime in Harlem is only a symptom slight enough for what it signifies,” Buck stated. “Race prejudice and race prejudice alone is the root of the plight of people in greater and lesser Harlems all over our country” (Anonymous 1941). Buck pointed out the general despair Black people faced finding job opportunities, especially in an economy preparing for war. “The swiftness with which this long-gathering despair has come to a present head is due, perhaps, more than to any other immediate cause, to the refusal of the majority of defense industries to employ colored labor on anything like an equal basis with white labor. To the colored American this is final proof of the hopelessness of his plight, that even in the defense of his country he is not allowed his share of work.”

Pearl Buck then made a bold challenge to Americans, to reconsider their Constitution to include all Black people as equals or to officially deny them full civil rights. “If the United States is to include subject and ruler peoples, then let us be honest about it and change the Constitution and make it plain that Negroes cannot share the privileges of the white people. True, we would then be totalitarian rather than democratic; but if that is what we want, let us say so and let us tell the Negro so. Then the white Americans will be relieved of the necessity of hypocrisy and the colored people will know where they are.”

Black newspapers like the Pittsburgh Courier reprinted the entire New York Times letter as their front page, with some added commentary. “We believe that the voice of Miss Buck is the voice America needs at this time. We further believe that here is one of the most pronounced and intelligent appeals yet made for national unity in this emergency,” the Courier’s editors wrote in a brief introduction to Buck’s letter.

The New York Age praised Buck but criticized the Times for not publishing similar letters submitted by Black writers. “Although we need all the friends we can get, and especially such articulate persons as Miss Buck, we do not feel that they should be set up as authorities on questions affecting us and given the place as spokesmen for the Negro in this country,” its editors wrote on November 29, 1941 (Anonymous 1941). A week after the Pearl Harbor attack, Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas had Buck’s letter read into the Congressional Record and he asked for the Senate to consider her remarks about discrimination against Blacks in the defense sector.

3 Wartime Commentaries

During World War II, Buck and her husband, Richard Walsh, engaged in multiple projects related to events in Asia and China. However, Pearl Buck remained committed to fighting against racism, even when those battles included criticizing America’s war allies and decisions made by the Roosevelt administration. Her speech at Howard University in Washington, D.C., a historically Black university, in May 1942 contained elements of a world view that sought equality (Buck 1942). Buck told students that discrimination in the United States had to end. “We cannot fight for freedom unless we fight for freedom for all. We are not better than fascists if we fight for freedom of one group and not another, for the benefit of one race and not another, for the aggrandizement of a part and not the betterment of the whole. And we must be better than fascists.”

Returning to a theme Buck often spoke about during the war, she presented race prejudice as a world problem, with the American war effort as a key part of a movement toward global equality. “You are not simply a group of people in one country. You are part of the great war of the peoples’ freedom. They are not only colored peoples against white. There are many white people on your side and white people in many parts of the world who are subject, too, to tyrants,” she reminded the graduates.

The Howard speech was met with a mixed reception. The mainstream media downplayed the speech. Gordon B. Hancock, a syndicated columnist for the Associated Negro Press, found Buck’s comments lacking (Hancock 1942). “But those of us who expected Miss Buck to give us a formula of deliverance must have been disappointed by her Howard address, for she held out little hope for immediate corrections and redresses such as the Negro rightly craves. Miss Buck told us that prejudice is the crux of the situation; but just how to quickly overcome or destroy this her suggestions were rather faltering,” Hancock wrote.

Pearl Buck’s remarks at Howard University became part of a larger pattern of commentary in her personal appearances and writings during the war. Buck tried to balance patriotism with a need for global equality that included an end to the era of colonialism. That included opposing the presence of European nations as colonial rulers-the same nations that were America’s war allies. Buck also strongly opposed Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist China leader, and she had at best a lukewarm relationship with Winston Churchill. These competing objectives made Buck a more controversial figure as the war dragged on to its conclusion, and China’s fate hung in the balance.

Buck’s most public comments on her policy positions appeared in her 1943 book, What America Means to Me. Excerpts from this series of essays and speeches were published in Black-owned newspapers nationally. Buck presented two messages. The first theme acknowledged the unjust treatment of Black Americans in their own country. The second theme asked the same group to put aside the short-term fight for equality for a larger purpose. “By linking your particular battle for your own place in your own country to the whole war of freedom and human equality in the world, you will enlarge your forces and strengthen your cause, and help to win the war for democracy,” Buck wrote (Buck and Pearl 1943). In a syndicated book review column for the Associated Press, editor John Selby praised Buck’s writing but questioned the timing of its release. “This collection of articles and speeches is mostly about quite a different subject, to wit, about Mrs. Buck’s idea that we shall lose the respect of the Eastern peoples and also the war (speaking broadly) if we don’t at once announce a program of complete national and racial equality after the war, and implement it,” Selby concluded. “The difficulty with this program is pretty obvious to me” (Selby 1943).

Buck also took an unpopular stand against the Roosevelt administration’s internment polices during the war based on emergency powers to the president. On May 22, 1942, Buck wrote to her friend Eleanor Roosevelt about the new policy of detaining Japanese nationals and Japanese Americans at internment camps. Buck told Mrs. Roosevelt that she had received complaints about “inhuman and cruel treatment” of the relocated people. Buck believed these actions were “much more German” than American (Schlup 2001). Roosevelt defended the policies. “I hear high praise for the way the Army has handled this evacuation,” she wrote to Buck, inviting her to visit some of the camps.

In October 1943, Buck made a surprise appearance at hearings conducted by the California state senate on the resettlement polices related to Japanese Americans returning to the West Coast. “The Nobel prize novelist had the committee members gasping for breath, or lunch, or air, or whatever, before she finished her 40-minute surprise appearance in the State building just before noon yesterday,” reported the Los Angeles Daily News (Anonymous 1943). “Our attitude toward the Japanese here today is being carefully watched throughout the world as a portent of the future,” she said. At one point, lawmakers tried to recess for lunch, but Buck kept lecturing the group, frequently mentioning the preferential treatment German Americans received in the state compared with Japanese Americans. “We have arbitrarily placed the Japanese in a class of their own, and by so doing we are breeding another war,” Buck told the committee. “I believe that we shall have war, as long as, or until we learn to deal with human beings as human beings, and justly.”

After the war, Buck continued as an advocate for civil rights, as a writer and a public speaker. One incident of note occurred in October 1948, where Buck was invited to speak at a state teachers’ association meeting in Maryland. The author was not aware that Black teachers would be excluded from the annual event. When she found out, Buck decided to appear at the gathering, despite her policy of not attending segregated meetings (Anonymous 1948). Instead of delivering her scheduled remarks on Asia, Buck announced that she was only appearing with the consent of the state’s Black teachers’ association. “It distressed me very much to learn that colored teachers were not to sit with us. I felt teachers that were my friends of many races and colors would not understand my speaking under these circumstances,” she noted. Buck then said the event organizers misled her, and she made unscheduled remarks about discrimination. “It is the white person whose personality must be split, trying to be a Christian, while denying the basic principles of Christianity.” Her remarks were met with applause from the audience. Buck then began her scheduled talk about affairs in Asia.

In 1948 Buck also collaborated with activist Eslanda Goode Robeson in the book American Argument, published by John Day the following year. Buck and Robeson tackled a basic question in the 206-page “talk book” of exchanges: “What do you think about when you think about being born in America?” The reviews in the press were mixed on the wide-ranging discussion from two viewpoints. Robeson, the wife and business manager of actor and singer Paul Robeson, was very accomplished in her own right as an academic and anthropologist. The Robesons were also connected to the Communist movement.

The Fort Worth Star Telegram noted that Buck chose Robeson as her debate partner “as the most completely American woman she knows with whom to hold searching conversation on such fundamental problems as marriage, child education, women in homes and in business, political problems, racial problems, and world security” (Fort Worth 1949). Its book review cast Robeson as a person who “sees America as a great rich land and a virile good-hearted people going to seed because they are misused.” It did not state Buck’s viewpoints in the book review, focusing on Robeson’s conclusion that “when Americans treat me and my people like Americans then I’ll like it and find advantage – and pride – in being American – not before.” In a review for the Hartford Courant, the newspaper called the book “thought provoking,” but it faulted Robeson for “vigorous championing of Russia’s cause.” However, the reviewer said the book was “well worth reading, and many an American male, upon looking through it, will probably be extremely surprised to find two American women who have such a deep understanding of life as it is lived in these United States” (Thomas 1949). The New York Times also criticized the book as “is not as strenuous as it might have been, for both women are what we call in today’s jargon ‘left of center’” (Duffus 1949).

Black-owned newspapers such as the New York Age and The Afro American had different perspectives. Writer Thelma Berlack Boozer in her New York Age column “The Feminist Viewpoint” labeled the book as remarkable “because two intelligent and vocal Americans – one white, the other colored – were able to meet on common ground. They exchanged interesting experiences, compared personal philosophies; admitted parallels and contrasts in travel, living, habits, families; and finally made a printed record that discusses their great country in light of making it more secure for themselves and everybody else” (Boozer 1949). J. Saunders Redding of The Afro American praised American Argument, but his review focused more on Robeson’s viewpoints on race and other matters. “Eslanda Robeson and Pearl Buck talk about humanity, and freedom, and the world, and they disagree often, as forthright, intelligent people do. American Argument adds up to a provocative, very readable book,” he concluded (Redding 1949).

On Feb. 6, 1949, Buck and Robeson appeared on the NBC radio program “The Author Meets the Critics.” On the air, literary critic Virgilia Peterson called the American Argument “embarrassing” and accused the authors of “being convinced of their own superiority over the common run of women and of men, too, I might add.” But Peterson agreed with Buck and Robeson’s viewpoints on racial issues. Radio personality Mary Margaret McBride also praised the book for its discussions on race in society (“The Author Meets the Critics,” 1949). In response to the program’s critics, Buck pointed to her opinion that American society was playing a role in fostering prejudice. “It is a fact that prejudice is not inherent, it is not innate, it is not inherited. It does not exist when a child is born,” she said. “This comes from teaching, whether it is the community, the behavior of their elders at home or in the schools. I don’t know. But definitely, that is part of education.” Robeson spent part of her interview time defending her viewpoints on the Soviet Union.

4 Confronting Segregation at the Nation’s Capital

By 1950, Pearl Buck’s role as an advocate for civil rights had lessened for several reasons. Most importantly, Buck became less of a constant national media presence when she and Richard Walsh opened their own adoption agency, Welcome House, based out of their Bucks County home in 1949. And in 1950, Buck decided to openly write about her intellectually disabled daughter, Carol, in a magazine article, and then in a book.

But the sudden onset of the Korean War in late 1950 brought Pearl Buck back into the national spotlight for her expertise in Asian affairs and politics. And soon, she took one of her last widely publicized stands against race prejudice when an unexpected controversy about school segregation found Buck. Early in January 1951, Buck had been in a public feud with a longtime friend, columnist Dorothy Thompson, about an interview Buck gave to the Japanese press about Korea. (Thompson later apologized to Buck about her remarks.) Buck’s name appeared daily in the national newspapers. She was also preparing for a publicity tour for her book about her daughter.

Buck remained a popular speaker, and she had received an invitation from Jennie Mustapha, assistant principal of Cardozo High School, to speak at its semi-annual commencement ceremony in Washington, D.C. Cardozo was not just any other Washington, D.C. public school. For generations, the building was the stately, grand Central High School. Designed by architect William Ittner in 1914, Central was an all-white school until 1950, and its notable alumni included actor Helen Hayes and the then-unknown John Edgar Hoover. Cardozo had been an all-Black school that ran out of room for students by 1949, when population shifts within the district saw enrollment fall at Central High School. The district held contentious hearings about moving the Cardozo students to the Central High School building and making it an all-Black school. In March 1950, the district said it would close Central High School and make it the new Cardozo High School (Washington Evening Star 1950). Among the most prominent objectors was Central High alumnus Hobart M. Corning, the school district’s superintendent. The school district’s real reason for the move, it was alleged, was to keep its segregated system at all costs by sending the former Central students to other all-white schools.

The invitation to Buck to speak to the first Black graduates at the old Central High School set off a firestorm. On January 21, 1951, news broke in Washington that the school district had banned Buck’s speech (Anonymous 1951). Corning said that Buck had not been “cleared” by the House Committee on Un-American Activities for her alleged past or current connections to Communists. He also blamed Jennie Mustapha, the assistant principal, for not asking his permission to invite Buck.

Howard University, the NAACP, and local ministers in Washington soon condemned Superintendent Hobart Corning (Anonymous 1951). On the next day, Buck spoke at Deep Run Valley High School in Hilltown, Pa., near her home in Bucks County, to a history class. After 90 min, she gave a plea to the students about the need for tolerance. “We must never hate any peoples of any nation. We must only hate ideas that these people believe in” (Anonymous 1951).

At the same time, Buck and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom sent a “message” from Buck to be given to students at Cardozo High School, but school officials also banned her printed speech. Copies of the speech made it to the press, and the Washington Post and the Washington Evening Star printed the full speech. Highlights from Buck’s message then appeared in the editorial columns of other national newspapers for the next month. In her remarks, Buck asked students to avoid bitterness about the school’s censorship. “Do not be discouraged by what has happened to you and me. There are millions of people in our country who believe in our American ideals and practice them. Such people will be warned by what has happened to us, this incident, which keeps me from speaking to you face to face… That it did happen is a fact that we must use, too, in our own lives” (Anonymous 1951). She then talked about her vision of America, as someone who spent most of their life overseas. “What is America? What makes our country more than any other piece of land and water on the globe? Nothing, except our ideal of human freedom, freedom for the individual. Because we have this ideal, we almost alone among the peoples today, have hope. We still dare to hope,” Buck wrote. Her final paragraph quoted Thomas Jefferson’s famous passage from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” After printing Buck’s remarks, the Washington Post commented, “If this be subversive, what kind of doctrine would the school board like our children to hear?” On January 28, 1951, Buck gave one of her only interviews about the incident to the Perkasie News-Herald. Buck told the newspaper that “racial discrimination has no place in a nation of free people” and it was up to Washington, D.C. as “the capital of the entire world” to eliminate it. The News-Herald then reprinted her speech in full.

Not all newspapers supported Buck. The Alabama Journal in Montgomery said Buck’s remarks were “not much of a speech” and it supported House Committee on Un-American Activities. However, the Washington Post’s editorials were syndicated nationally and critical of Hobart Corning and the school district. The Post compared the school district’s stance to “100 percent Americanism,” the 1920s rallying cry of the Ku Klux Klan.

By March 1951, the controversy faded away until Superintendent Corning publicly reprimanded assistant principal Mustapha and Principal Robert Mattingly for misconduct, and Corning threatened to fire Mustapha if she protested the school district’s speaker approval policy. Corning also accused her of conduct “unbecoming a public official.”

Three years later, the Washington, D.C. school segregation policy was one of several cases consolidated in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which ended school segregation nationally. Hobart Corning was put in charge of integrating schools in Washington, including Cardozo High School, in 1954.

During the 1950s and 1960s, references to Buck’s viewpoints on race and civil rights became less frequent in the popular press, but she had acquired one notable reviewer of her work: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI started a considerable file of Buck’s printed comments on race and other issues in a dossier starting in the early 1940s (Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI 2022).

Years later, much of the FBI’s dossier on Pearl Buck was released. To the agency, Pearl Buck was known as someone who was against racial segregation. “All of her activities tend to indicate that she considers herself as a champion of the colored races, and she has campaigned vigorously for racial equality,” her file read.