Twentieth century Negro literature : $b or, A cyclopedia of thought on the vital topics relating to the American Negro
History
Twentieth century Negro literature : $b or, A cyclopedia of thought on the vital topics relating to the American Negro
African Americans -- History
The schools are, however, only one of the agencies of education in the
broadest acceptation of that term. Equally potent with scholastic
training, if not more so, is the cultivation of social sentiment in
the community. Sentiment is higher than law, and the endeavor of all
honest legislation should be to make laws expressive of the mandates
of the highest and best sentiment. Any given community can almost
always be trusted to act upon the impulse of sentiment, whether this
comports with the law or not. Whether expressed or unexpressed, the
social sentiment among Negroes--and it is seemingly often innate--is
not favorable to the support of their own enterprises and professional
men. Were it otherwise, we should now have prosperous wholesale and
retail merchants, successful factories, large real estate agencies,
considerable banks, solid insurance companies, better institutions of
learning, well-paid lawyers, physicians, dentists, etc., and the
reaction on the whole race would have been to change our status in the
nation from that of mendicant denizens, as at present, to that of
influential well-to-do citizens. This mutual helping of each other is
expected of us, if we are to judge from the evidences given us from
time to time by our white fellow citizens. For example, the white
undertakers in Augusta, Georgia, have given up to the colored
undertakers all their Negro patronage. The best white physicians do
not seek Negro patients. Although greed for "the almighty dollar"
keeps most white business men seeking Negro patronage, they do not, as
a rule, try to prevent Negroes from patronizing Negroes except by
striving to make it to their pecuniary advantage to patronize white
men. In a word, it is natural, they allow, for birds of a feather to
flock together. And this is true of the Jew, the German, the Irishman,
of all except the Negro. As it is, the average Negro chooses rather to
be discourteously and carelessly treated by a white professional or
business man, often of inferior ability, than to be properly treated
by a man of superior ability of his own race. Hence, to induce Negro
patronage of Negro enterprises and professional men, there must be
cultivation of the social sentiment of the Negro community by all
possible means.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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