Good Earth, The - Pearl S. Buck [159]
Above all, Buck consistently unmasked America's own hypocrisy by contrasting the nation's democratic rhetoric with the reality of discrimination against African-Americans. She had been active in civil rights organizations since her return to the U.S. in the early 1930s. She was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a director of the National Urban League; she published essays in support of black rights in both Crisis and Opportunity magazines; she lobbied President Roosevelt on behalf of the long-delayed anti-lynching bill.
Throughout World War II, she played a prominent role in arguing against the segregation of the armed forces and discrimination against blacks in war industries. Walter White, longtime executive secretary of the NAACP, said at a 1942 rally in New York City's Madison Square Garden that only two white Americans understood the reality of black life, and both were women: Eleanor Roosevelt and Pearl Buck.
Along with her tireless efforts on behalf of the Chinese and African-Americans, Buck was also active in the campaign for women's rights. In the late 1930s, she wrote a series of articles for magazines such as Harper's that demanded the inclusion of women in American public life. In 1941, she collected her essays into a book, Of Men and Women, a pioneering feminist statement that has been compared to the work of Virginia Woolf.
After the war, Buck found herself under attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy and other right-wing politicians for her liberal views. She had also been the target of FBI surveillance, which began in 1938 and continued to the end of her life. She continued to work for human rights, especially the welfare of children. Though she was now over fifty, she adopted several more children, including two mixed-race children.
She was particularly touched by the plight of the Amerasian children in countries like China and Japan who had been fathered and abandoned by American servicemen. Such children were outcasts in Asian societies, which have always emphasized legitimacy and patriarchal descent. In 1949, in order to find American homes for such children, Buck founded Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency in the world. After the Korean War, thousands of mixed-race, Korean-American children were adopted through Welcome House; some years later, the agency found American homes for thousands of Vietnamese-American children.
In the last twenty years of her life, Buck continued to speak out on American relations with Asia and on civil rights. She was a friend of the internationally famous singer, actor, and civil rights activist Paul Robeson and his wife Eslande; in 1949, Buck and Eslande Robeson co-authored a book on America's racial dilemma. Buck supported a nuclear test ban and wrote the novel Command the Morning to dramatize the dangers of atomic war. She called for the diplomatic recognition of Communist China by the United States. In 1950, she published a book called The Child Who Never Grew, a story about her retarded daughter, Carol. The book was a landmark. Specifically, it encouraged Rose Kennedy to talk publicly about her retarded child, Kathleen. More generally, it helped to change American attitudes toward mental illness.
In 1954, her husband Richard had a stroke, from which he never recovered; he declined over the following six years and died in 1960. Several years later, Buck founded the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to provide foster care for Amerasian children who could not be adopted by American families. In the late 1960s, when she was in her seventies, Buck formed a relationship with a younger man, Theodore Harris, a dance instructor with Arthur Murray Studios, who became director of the Pearl S. Buck Foundation and her constant companion. The relationship, which became the subject of extensive public gossip, put a considerable