The Making of a Document: "The Quiet One"

Abstract

THE REACTION provoked by the documentary The Quiet One constitutes one more proof that the Negro problem is the major test of American democracy. Actually, for the makers of the film the problem did not exist at all. The fact that they chose a Negro boy as the hero of their film, however sly as strategy, is incidental to the spirit of the finished work. The little boy might equally well have been white, yellow, red, or even blue. We must not forget that we are dealing with an intelligent and progressive producing group, miles away from any racial preconception, which always implies stupidity. The problem in this case was special: to expose one of the saddest and most degrading aspects of human misery, that which afflicts children in the midst of a society blinded by the instinct for gain. In stating the matter in this way, I speak only for myself, for I have never seen any such declaration from the film's creators, the members of Film Documents, Inc. It seems to me the real message in the picture, although its discreet publicity spoke of it merely as "the story of a human being in search of love." Yet if we consider that this search takes place within an urban cancer, the slum district of Harlem, and that the one who searches is a little Negro boy, a member of the most humiliated and offended of North American minorities-economically an outcast, emotionally frustrated, mentally backward, socially maladjusted,-we shall see that it is not merely love that the unhappy child needs, but justice, equality of treatment, respect, and dignity, in order to live in the community of men without distinction of color or creed.