Full Text of the Excerpt

MARY FREDERICKSON:

I was curious about the staff and your interaction with the staff while you were there.

GUION JOHNSON:

We had very cordial interaction. Even the . . . there was a young Communist (Lyonel C. Florant) who was a very brilliant student in economics and took his master's from Columbia and was working on his doctorate at Columbia, who was the only one who was at all antagonistic——as far as we were aware.

MARY FREDERICKSON:

He was antagonistic from the left.

GUION JOHNSON:

Yes, from the left. He said that he didn't want any blankity blank southern white woman writing on racial ideology. That if Gunnar Myrdal was to have a study of the history of racial ideology it should be from a northern black and not a blankity blank southern white woman. I was not aware of this undercurrent because he was always very pleasant and cordial to me. And his wife was on the Daily Worker staff. So, some of our friends said, "Invite him to your apartment together. And just in your natural conversation treat him as you would without this knowledge of his objecting to your doing the historical study. You'll convert him." So we did invite them to come and have dinner with us. And his wife wanted to spend all of her time leaning out the window looking at the beautiful view into Jersey. We were on Riverside Drive and here was the river, and the lights were very lovely. In fact, the de Haas painting that we have was made from almost this point. It doesn't show up quite as well because of the glass on it. It's an oil painting but we need to have the glass removed and the picture cleaned. Then . . . it was a lovely view of New Jersey. She said, "I wouldn't mind being rich, if I could live in an apartment like this and look out at this beautiful view." We could hardly . . . by that time the children-we had sent the children back to Chapel Hill. School was out and our housekeeper had gone back and our cook had gone back to Chapel Hill. So we were going to take them [the Florants] out. We were going to have hors d'oeurves and drinks and then take them to a French restaurant. She didn't want to go. "Don't you . . . couldn't we just have scrambled eggs and bacon so I can sit here and look at this . . . " So we said "No, we're sorry, we don't even have any scrambled eggs. We're at the point now that we're working so hard we don't even have breakfast at home." Which was true. We'd get up and go to Childe's for breakfast and go to work. Have all three of our meals out and come back and get to work on our study at night. Because we were both grinding out a lot of research. We took them to a French restaurant where we had been before and we had alerted them that we were to bring a black couple——they were both rather dark——and they said "Oh, no problem; no problem." But they didn't want to seat us. They were very slow about seating us. And then put us out, oh, away, we were almost obscured from the rest of the dining room. And this they resented very much. So the dinner ended with both Florant and his wife being rather frigid. Because they were . . . it may be that they thought we had deliberately taken them to a place where they would be embarrassed. This was the only time we saw her; probably the last time we saw Florant. But he went to Princeton to work for just a short time with Gunnar Myrdal and Arnold Rose and then he died of pneumonia soon after that.