The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial IssueVarious
History
The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue
Various
African Americans -- Social conditions -- To 1964; Civil rights movements; Martin Luther King, Jr., Day; United States -- History
Scarcely second in importance to improvements in house architecture
is the need among Negroes of more time to spend with their families.
Employers of Negro labor should be less exacting in the number of hours
required for a day's work. Many domestic servants now work from six in
the morning until nine and ten o'clock at night. The Southern habit
of keeping open shopping-places until late at night encourages late
suppers, retains cooks, butlers, and nurses until bedtime, and robs
them of all home life. If the merchants would close their shops at six
o'clock, as is the custom in the North, the welfare of both races would
be greatly promoted.
Again, a revolution is needed in the character of the Negro's religion.
At present it is too largely an affair of the emotions. He needs to
be taught that the religious life is something to grow into by the
perfection of personality, and not to be jumped into or sweated into
at camp-meetings. The theological seminaries and the graduate preachers
should assume the task of grafting upon the religion of the Negro that
much sanity at least.
A reform is as much needed in the methods and aims of Negro education.
Up to the present Negro education has shared with that of the white man
the fault of being top-heavy. Colleges and universities have developed
out of proportion to, and at the expense of, common schools. Then,
the kind of education afforded the Negro has not been fitted to his
capacities and needs. He has been made to pursue courses of study
parallel to those prescribed for the whites, as though the individuals
of both races had to fill the same positions in life. Much of the
Negro's education has had nothing to do with his real life-work. It
has only made him discontented and disinclined to unfold his arms. The
survival of the Negroes in the race for existence depends upon their
retaining possession of the few bread-winning occupations now open to
them. But instead of better qualifying themselves for these occupations
they have been poring over dead languages and working problems in
mathematics. In the meantime the Chinaman and the steam-laundry have
abolished the Negro's wash-tub, trained white "tonsorial artists" have
taken away his barber's chair, and skilled painters and plasterers and
mechanics have taken away his paint-brushes and tool-chests. Every year
the number of occupations open to him becomes fewer because of his lack
of progress in them. Unless a radical change takes place in the scope of
his education, so that he may learn better how to do his work, a tide of
white immigration will set in and force him out of his last stronghold,
domestic service, and limit his sphere to the farm.
All primary schools for the Negroes should be equipped for industrial
training in such work as sewing, cooking, laundering, carpentry, and
house-cleaning, and, in rural districts, in elementary agriculture.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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