In my own observation, this is quite true; the notable fact, as yet unrecognized by many staunch Southern segregationists, is that a new Negro is in fact emerging--the bright young high school senior, the serious college student, the impatient middle-class Negro couple, struggling for respectability and status. Their impact is yet to be wholly felt within their own race, but it is being felt increasingly upon white institutions; and as a consequence, as Carleton observes, racial attitudes among white persons in certain parts of the South _are_ subtly changing. He terms this a “softening.” It is sometimes a hardening, too, as white families, having long cherished an affection for “their” Negroes, discover that their charges prefer not to be known as Uncle Toms or Aunt Jemimas; the disillusioned reaction, out of chagrin and embarrassment, is to let them bail themselves out of trouble, if that’s the way they want it. The relationship changes. But if the Southern Negro is to find salvation at all, he must find it in this trend to independence and maturity. “The most important immediate force at work to emancipate the Negro of the South,” says Carleton, “is the Southern Negro himself. A great change has come over him. He is no longer an Uncle Tom, or even the kind of Negro approved of by Booker T. Washington. He now talks back. He has a new self-respect, a new confidence, a new independence. Increasingly he is depending less on Northern Negro initiative and leadership and is supplying his own.” To the extent that this prophecy is fulfilled--for all the bitter incidents, severances, and failures that may be expected--the upward and forward motion of the Negro will be recorded. “The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” The brooding, introspective advice of Cassius ought not to be spurned; it ought rather to be put to thoughtful use by those genuinely (as distinguished from merely politically) concerned with the Negroes’ movement out of an underling’s status. James B. Conant has recognized this, however belatedly, in his _Slums and Suburbs_. Here Dr. Conant paints a grimly realistic picture of a Negro child’s life in the urban slums of the North, where the child may live six flights up in a tenement offering “one filthy room with a bed, a light bulb, and a stink.” It is after visiting such tenements, and inspecting the schools attended by slum children, that he grows impatient “with both critics and defenders of public education who ignore the realities of school situations to engage in fruitless debate about educational philosophy, purposes, and the like: These situations call for action, not for hair-splitting arguments.”