SOURCE: "Black Cream," in Spectator, Vol. 222, No. 7337, February 7, 1969, pp. 174-75.

[In the following review, Hughes situates the themes of Soul on Ice in the context of American race relations at the middle of the twentieth century.]

In one of the scenarios which experts make to fix our future nightmares, a research team from Rutgers University has predicated that, due to the rise of temperature in American rivers from hot effluent waste, some major streams will be at boiling point by 1980 and may have evaporated by 2010. Refrigeration will not help; it only generates more waste heat. It is a curious quirk which leads the liberal audience to accept such scientific probabilities at once, while instinctively rejecting the social eschatology of its likely future. The refrigerants won't work for suds, but—surely?—they will for race; and a civil war in America between black men and white can be averted...