The streets were like avenues of the dead. They only caught a ten-year-old Negro boy. They took his clothes off, and burned them. They burned his tail with lighted matches, made him step on lighted matches, urinated on him, and sent him running off naked with a couple of slaps in the face.

In the twentieth century … the idea of community scarcely means anything anymore … except among the submerged, the “lowly” … called communities because they are informed by their knowledge that only they of the community can sustain and re-create each other. The great, vast, shining Republic knows nothing about them – recognizes their existence only in time of stress, as during a military adventure, say, or an election year, or when their dangerous situation erupts into what the Republic generally calls a “riot.” And it goes without saying that these communities, incipient, wounded, or functioning, are between the carrot and the stick of the American dream.