African Americans; African Americans -- Politics and government -- 20th century; African Americans -- Social conditions -- To 1964
American Indian, of such a process of elimination and assimilation, will
always be a thorn in the flesh of the Republic, in which there is,
admittedly, no place for the integrality and growth of a distinct race
type. The Afro-American people, for reasons that I have stated, are even
now very far from being such a distinct race type, and without further
admixture of white and black blood, will continue to be less so to the end
of the chapter. It seems to me that this view of the matter has not
received the consideration that it deserves at the hands of those who set
themselves up as past grand masters in the business of "solving the race
problem," and in accurately defining "The Negro's Place in American Life
at the Present Day." The negroid type and the Afro-American type are two
very distinct types, and the sociologist who confounds them, as is very
generally done, is bound to confuse his subject and his audience.
It is a debatable question as to whether the Negro's present industrial
position is better or worse than it was, say, at the close of the
Reconstruction period. As a mass, I am inclined to the opinion that it is
worse, as the laws of the States where he is congregated most numerously
are so framed as to favor the employer in every instance, and he does not
scruple to get all out of the industrial slave that he can; which is, in
the main, vastly more than the slave master got, as the latter was at the
expense of housing, feeding, clothing and providing medical service for
his chattel, while the former is relieved of this expense and trouble.
Prof. W.E.B. DuBois, of Atlanta University, who has made a critical study
of the rural Negro of the Southern States, sums up the industrial phase of
the matter in the following ("The Souls of Black Folk," pp. 39-40):
"For this much all men know: Despite compromise, war and struggle, the
Negro is not free. In the backwoods of the Gulf States, for miles and
miles, he may not leave the plantation of his birth; in well-nigh the
whole rural South the black farmers are peons, bound by law and custom to
an economic slavery, from which the only escape is death or the
penitentiary. In the most cultured sections and cities of the South the
Negroes are a segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and
privileges. Before the courts, both in law and custom, they stand on a
different and peculiar basis. Taxation without representation is the rule
of their political life. And the result of all this is, and in nature must
have been, lawlessness and crime."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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