Black and White Unite and Fight

Black and White Unite and Fight is the title of one of the political pamphlets Jan Erlone gives Bigger. Its promise of cooperation across racial lines becomes significant not because Bigger embraces it, but because he turns the pamphlet into possible evidence for his defense while the novel exposes how far solidarity is from the conditions of his life. The phrase’s hopeful image sits beside his shame at Jan’s friendly gesture, his uneasy fantasies of collective power, and the material divisions Max later describes in court.

The Pamphlet and Its Images

On the morning Bigger must take Mary Dalton’s trunk to the station, he finds Jan’s pamphlets in his coat pocket and considers discarding them along with other incriminating objects. Instead, he decides to keep them and use them if questioned. He plans to say that Jan insisted he take them, that he had not opened them, and that he feared the political ideas they represented. The pamphlets’ titles include Race Prejudice on Trial and The Negro Question in the United States, as well as Black and White Unite and Fight.

Bigger studies one pamphlet’s emblems: a hammer and a curved knife, followed by the name of the Communist Party of the United States. Farther on, he sees a drawing of a white hand clasping a black hand. The image recalls Jan standing on the car’s running board and shaking hands with him. What Jan may have offered as an ordinary gesture of fellowship had left Bigger with a sense of humiliation and resentment. He now converts both the pamphlets and that remembered encounter into a story he can tell the police: he had not wanted to be with Jan and Mary, he can claim, and had done so only because it was his job. The title’s call to unite is thus first encountered as something Bigger intends to explain away.

Solidarity and Distrust

The title also resonates with Bigger’s conflicted response to other Black people. As he rides past people on snow-covered sidewalks, he recognizes that they share the fear and shame produced by the white power governing their lives. Yet recognition does not give him a secure feeling of common purpose. He believes that their differences keep them from forming a shared life, and imagines that only the extremity of facing death might bind them together. Hope, in his account, does not readily overcome those divisions.

Bigger’s longing for collective action is itself compromised. He imagines ending fear by making Black people act together under his direction, and dreams vaguely of a leader who could force them into a unified band. That wish for solidarity is mixed with a desire to rule others, not simply to join them. His admiration for powerful conquerors is likewise presented as an imagined escape from shame and helplessness, rather than as a considered political program. The pamphlet title therefore names a possibility Bigger cannot inhabit: he yearns for unified action, but pictures it through control and force, while distrusting the people with whom he might act.

The Social Conditions Behind the Promise

At Mary Dalton’s inquest, Max’s questions about Mr. Dalton’s real-estate policies give the title’s ideal a material context. He asks why the Thomas family and other Black families pay more rent than white families for comparable housing, and why the Thomas family is charged eight dollars a week for a single unventilated, rat-infested room shared by four people. Mr. Dalton answers that supply and demand regulate prices. Max also presses him about whether company policy keeps Black residents confined to one part of the South Side; Mr. Dalton acknowledges that it works that way, while distancing himself from its origin.

Max further challenges the separation between Mr. Dalton’s profits and his philanthropy. He asks whether money donated to Black education compensates for excessive rents and the conditions in which Black families are made to live. The exchange makes interracial solidarity more than a matter of personal goodwill: the pamphlet’s joined hands are set against housing arrangements that preserve racial separation and unequal economic relations. Mr. Dalton’s charitable giving does not, in Max’s account, undo the system from which his wealth and the Thomas family’s deprivation emerge.

The Phrase in the Trial’s Larger Argument

In his plea for Bigger’s life, Max describes a society that dictates where Black people may live, how much schooling they may receive, where they may eat, and what work they may do. He argues that the Thomas and Dalton families have been assigned sharply unequal positions—renter and landlord, customer and merchant, employee and employer—and that personal benevolence cannot repair that structure by itself. His argument develops the social meaning implicit in the pamphlet title: unity cannot be secured by a hopeful image while laws, property, and daily custom keep people apart.

The novel also complicates the title through the treatment of Bessie. At the inquest, her body is presented as evidence in a proceeding focused on Mary’s death. Bigger understands that Bessie’s killing will be used to strengthen the demand that he be destroyed, while her death has not received comparable attention as the death of a Black woman. His reflection recognizes the indignity of making her serve another case, even as he is responsible for her death. Against that unequal public recognition, Black and White Unite and Fight remains an aspiration under pressure: the words imagine a common cause, while the events surrounding them reveal how racial hierarchy and violence deny equal standing to the people such a cause would have to include.