The Southern Case for School SegregationKilpatrick, James Jackson
History
The Southern Case for School Segregation
Kilpatrick, James Jackson
African Americans -- Segregation; Segregation -- Southern States
If the Negro people have the innate capacity that Montagu, Clark,
Comas, Boas and the others insist they have, the Negro people in time
will overcome every obstacle that fate has put in their way. On their
own initiative, as a product of their own industry and skill, they
will develop the talents that command respect in the market place.
They will provide their own capital, build their own enterprises,
sell their own wares, compete among themselves until they have
learned to compete in the whole wide world. They will exert, within
their own community, the moral leadership necessary to reduce crime
and illegitimacy. By participation first in their own constructive
public affairs they will prove themselves capable of contributing
actively to the civic, social, and economic life of their counties,
towns, and cities. They will stop trying simply to imitate the white
man; they will discover themselves first, and if this inner self is
all that the liberal anthropologists assert it to be, the discovery
should lead to wondrous exploitation. _Ebony_ magazine made this
same point editorially in 1959, when it urged its readers to stop
complaining about being referred to as “Negro” or as “colored”: “The
real problem is the man called Negro. If he would spend as much time
dignifying his race as he does decrying its designation, if he would
quit worrying about the label and concentrate upon improving the
product, the stuff inside, the name would take care of itself.”
This was sound advice, and one of the hopeful aspects of the South
in the early 1960s (there are not many) is that a new generation of
young Negroes may even act upon it. Carleton remarks in his essay
upon the increasing nationalization of the Southern Negro, who now,
more often than not, has some Northern connections; and he says this:
“Not only has the Southern Negro been nationalized, he has also
developed his own propertied and business classes, his own wealthy
and middle classes. Every Southern city of any size has a group of
economically comfortable and relatively independent lawyers, doctors,
teachers, morticians, contractors, insurance agents, and owners of
small businesses--garages and filling stations, restaurants, taverns,
barber shops, beauty parlors, stores, and so forth. These people have
education or considerable economic independence, or both.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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