the desegregation of its public schools. When it is asked why the
South opposes integration, one might provide a tolerably complete
answer simply by citing Dr. Johnson’s twelve summary findings: _This
is why._ The most Dr. Johnson will say of the “stereotype” is that
it contains a “certain amount of truth.” In my own observation, and
in the observation of the white South generally, the list contains a
vast amount of truth. I would dissent from the Johnson findings on
a couple of points only: I doubt that the “Negro masses” (any more
than the white masses) have a “high interest in and appreciation
of the artistic,” and it seems to me the summary of the Negro’s
typical “public manners” is overdrawn. Since 1943, when Dr. Johnson
prepared his summary, a phenomenal growth has taken place in a Negro
middle class, and much of the “loud talk” and “relative carelessness
in speech and dress” has given way to cultivated speech and to a
certain elegance in dress. In my observation, the colored children
of Richmond frequently are cleaner, shinier, and more neatly dressed
than many of their white counterparts.
In general, however, this purported “stereotype” provides an accurate
and faithful mold of typical Negro behavior and personality. Are
these traits a consequence of racial inheritance? The overwhelmingly
popular view of anthropologists, social and physical, is that these
are _not_ innate characteristics. The entire school of Franz Boas,
embraced by Kluckhohn, Benedict, Klineberg, Clark, Rose, Comas,
Montagu, and many others, holds firmly, and in some cases almost
hysterically, that whatever lags may be observed in typically
Negro culture, as contrasted with typically white culture, these
shortcomings are entirely owing to environment. As the Group for the
Advancement of Psychiatry puts it, “these handicaps are a consequence
of racial discrimination rather than of racial inferiority.”
The view, however, is not unanimous, nor is the manner in which these
“environmental” views are advanced universally acclaimed.
“If we in America are going to make any sense out of the Supreme
Court’s desegregation decision,” Dr. Frank C. J. McGurk has remarked,
“we will have to be more factual about race differences and much
less emotional. We can have our dreams, if we like to dream, but we
should be willing to distinguish between dreams and reality. Already,
we have gone too far toward confusing these two things. As far as
psychological differences between Negroes and whites are concerned,
we have wished--and dreamed that there were no such differences. We
have identified this wish with reality, and on it we have established
a race relations policy that was so clearly a failure that we had to
appeal to distorting propaganda for its support.... There is ample
evidence that there are psychological differences between Negroes and
whites. Moreover, these differences are, today, of about the same
magnitude as they were two generations ago. These differences are not
the result of differences in social and economic opportunities, and
they will not disappear as the social and economic opportunities of
Negroes and whites are equalized.”
Dr. McGurk is associate professor of psychology at Villanova. The
quotation comes from his famous (or infamous, depending on one’s
point of view) article in _U. S. News & World Report_ of September
21, 1956. Several years later, Dr. McGurk provided an introduction
for Nathaniel Weyl’s _The Negro in American Civilization_, in which
he expanded briefly on the same theme. Weyl’s book, published by
Public Affairs Press in 1960, is an almost indispensable work to
the student of this subject who is sincerely interested in getting
“both sides.” (Another valuable work, also published by Public
Affairs Press, is Carleton Putnam’s _Race and Reason: A Yankee
View_; Putnam has driven the Liberal anthropologists practically
to apoplexy by the unfair tactic of reading their works and taking
them seriously--something no layman is expected to do. The rule is
that non-anthropologists must treat anthropologists respectfully,
even when anthropologists write nonsense). Like Putnam, Weyl was
raised and educated in the integrated North. He set out to write his
book with Northern preconceptions; but the more deeply he dug for
facts, the more he discovered that “material which passed for the
objective findings of social scientists could more accurately be
characterized as rationalizations and propaganda wearing academic cap
and gown.” He demonstrated the intellectual courage to abandon his
preconceived ideas, and to conclude after an exhaustive study that
“the presumption is strongly in favor of innate psychic differences.”
In his introduction, Dr. McGurk describes Weyl’s book as a refreshing
antidote to the one-sided, environmentalist argumentation that is
all most college students ever receive, and he goes on to urge that
from the standpoint of the scientist, the problem of race should
be studied in an objective manner: “Appeals to beliefs, morals,
ethics, or political philosophy are out of place; the issue is one
of fact.... Ethnic differences are facts. In the psychic area, these
differences are important facts. It seems much more sane to face
these differences and investigate their causes impartially than to
play ostrich about them.”
Let us go back, for a moment, to Dr. Johnson’s “stereotype.”
Manifestly, many of the characteristics he finds most widely
attributed to the Negro are incapable of statistical measurement.
Empirical data could not well be compiled, for example, on “relative
lack of self-reliance,” or “love of subtlety and indirection.” But
one characteristic found to be more typical of the Negro than of the
white is “high sexual indulgence, larger sphere of permissive sexual
relations, ... and high rate of illegitimacy.” The illegitimacy, at
least, can be statistically tabulated, and the appalling facts can be
faced.
What are the facts? First, the illegitimacy rate among Negroes
in this country is roughly _ten times_ the illegitimacy rate
among whites. Second, the condition is not improving, but on the
contrary appears in many areas to be growing worse. Third, a
disproportionately high rate of illegitimacy among Negroes obtains
not only in the South, but throughout the United States.
These are the grim figures from the National Office of Vital
Statistics:
--------------------------------------------------
ILLEGITIMATES AS A PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL LIVE BIRTHS
UNITED STATES, 1940-1959
--------------------------------------------------
_1940_ _1945_ _1950_ _1955_ _1959_
White 1.95 2.36 1.75 1.86 2.21
Nonwhite 16.83 17.93 17.96 20.24 21.80
--------------------------------------------------
Consider the record in two Southern States, Mississippi and Virginia.
Here are the figures from Mississippi:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
ILLEGITIMATE BIRTHS, MISSISSIPPI, 1935-1960
-----------------------------------------
WHITE NEGRO
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
_Per cent _Per cent _Per cent
of all All White All Negro
_Year_ _Number_ Births_ _Number_ Births_ _Number_ Births_
1960 8,407 14.2 388 1.4 8,019 25.0
1959 8,091 13.4 370 1.3 7,721 23.7
1958 7,581 12.8 310 1.2 7,271 22.4
1957 7,815 12.9 272 1.0 7,543 22.2
1956 7,791 12.5 294 1.1 7,497 21.5
1955 7,909 12.5 274 1.0 7,635 21.4
1950 6,778 10.5 283 1.0 6,495 17.4
1945 5,499 10.2 223 0.9 5,276 17.5
1940 4,699 8.9 268 1.2 4,431 15.0
1935 3,978 8.2 265 1.2 3,713 14.1
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The vital statistics take on additional meaning when they are
translated in terms of human beings. In the five years 1956 through
1960, white mothers in Mississippi gave birth to 1634 illegitimate
children. In the same period, Negro mothers gave birth to 38,051
illegitimate children.
Substantially the same picture may be seen in the records of
Virginia. Between 1938 and 1958, the white illegitimacy rate in
Virginia declined slightly, from 2.6 to 2.3 per cent. In this same
period, which witnessed astonishing gains in Negro education, Negro
housing, Negro income, and Negro job opportunities, the rate of Negro
illegitimacy increased from 19.5 per cent to 22.9 per cent.
The records of five Virginia cities and five Virginia counties of
substantial Negro population are entirely typical:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
ILLEGITIMATE BIRTHS AS A PERCENTAGE
OF TOTAL NEGRO BIRTHS
CITIES
_Richmond_ _Norfolk_ _Roanoke_ _Danville_ _Lynchburg_
1935-39 27.2 24.6 25.1 26.6 29.5
1955-58 30.3 22.0 26.6 29.0 28.1
COUNTIES
_Prince _Charles
_Halifax_ Edward_ _Pittsylvania_ City_ _Greensville_
1935-39 12.4 14.5 12.8 14.3 14.2
1955-58 19.9 21.5 18.6 23.4 22.0
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The U. S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare periodically
releases data on the nation as a whole. The figures for 1957
illustrate the story. In that year, 1.9 per cent of all white
births were illegitimate; 21.7 per cent of all Negro births were
illegitimate. Negro illegitimacy ran as high as 27.9 per cent in St.
Louis, 29.3 per cent in Atlanta, and 34.6 per cent in Knoxville. The
influx of Negroes into Washington, D. C., has given the nation’s
capital, to the nation’s shame, what the Washington _Post_ has
termed “undisputed first place in illegitimacy.” In 1957, nearly 19
per cent of all births recorded in the District of Columbia were
illegitimate--5.8 per cent of the whites and 26.5 per cent of the
Negroes.
Now, a widespread custom among Negro apologists is to scoff these
figures away. It is said, for one thing, that there is “a relatively
greater understatement of illegitimacy in the white group than in
the nonwhite.” For my own part, I doubt this exceedingly. It is
said, also, that a greater percentage of extramarital pregnancies
are aborted among white girls than among Negro girls. Perhaps. A
third line of rationalization typically has been advanced by the
_Norfolk Journal and Guide_, a Negro newspaper; this has to do with
the fact that slaves were not permitted to marry prior to 1865,
though they were encouraged to cohabit, and “it is foolish to
suppose that a suppressed and constantly vilified minority group
could wholly recover from the practice in a few generations.” A
related argument, if it is an argument at all, is that in pre-War
times “many white slave-owners promiscuously exploited their slave
women sexually.” Other rationalizations put some of the blame for
Negro sexual looseness on housing, economic opportunity, low income
levels, and the like. Generally, it is all charged to the “system of
segregation,” a charge that tends to collapse when it is observed
that the high rates of Negro illegitimacy recorded in the South are
not materially different in the integrated climes of Pennsylvania,
Minnesota, Illinois, Missouri, and West Virginia.
But the basic validity of the statistics is not entirely discounted,
even by Negro commentators. Carl Rowan, the Minneapolis newspaperman
who came to the State Department with the New Frontier, faced up
to them (after a good deal of preliminary squirming) in _Harper’s_
in 1961. A leading Negro educator, President Thomas H. Henderson
of Virginia Union University, offered some thoughtful comments in
a paper delivered before the Virginia Conference of Social Work in
1957. He said:
“Let me begin by saying what the problem of a high illegitimacy
rate among Negroes is not. It is not, first of all, a statistical
illusion.... [T]he illegitimacy rate for Virginia Negroes has been
ten times as high as that for whites each year for several decades.
After subducting the maximum influence of all possible sources
of error in the statistics, the consistency and magnitude of the
differential leaves no doubt that a real and disturbing difference
exists.”
The problem cannot be blamed, said Dr. Henderson, on any particular
desire to obtain public benefits under the program of Aid to
Dependent Children. Moreover, “it is not to any great degree a
problem of racial interbreeding--every indication points to a steady
decrease in interbreeding since before the dawn of this century.”
The problem is “overwhelmingly a problem of illegitimacy with both
parents colored.” He added:
“The problem is not the result of innate differences between the
races. It would be less painful if it were. If the Negro had innate
moral weakness or blindness, if he had an innately inferior
intelligence, or in some inborn way either his sex drive or his
fertility were somehow different, we could shrug off the problem by
saying, ‘God made it that way; there’s nothing to do about it.’ But
we are faced with the hard fact that reputable scientists regard as
fruitless all efforts to find valid evidence of any innate moral
weakness of the Negro or any innate difference in personality,
intelligence, or sexual behavior.”
Dr. Henderson went on in his paper to summarize many of the
mitigating factors earlier mentioned, including socio-economic
status, recreational limitations, inadequate sex education
within Negro families and schools, and the tensions generated
by discrimination. But he suspected that these various factors
together do not account for more than half the problem: “Without
a statistically valid basis for it, my opinion is strong that the
primary factor is that of motivation. _The simple fact is that many
Negro boys and girls do not want strongly enough to avoid producing
illegitimate children._ The rank and file of those who are at the
lowest social levels have not changed their attitude to illegitimacy
since the days of slavery when sexual laxness in Negroes was
tolerated and even encouraged.” [Emphasis supplied.]
A notable comment along that line appeared in the St. Louis _Evening
Whirl_, a Negro newspaper, early in 1960, in an account of a colored
woman who complained, after giving birth to her ninth illegitimate
child, that her allowance under Aid to Dependent Children had been
cut from $185 to $110 a month. She felt “discriminated against.” Said
the _Whirl_ editorially:
Mrs. Brown thinks that she is entitled to live a normal life with
a boyfriend and not have to waste money running around hotels and
rooming houses. They can’t afford it.
Mrs. Brown is young and normal. She is only 29. She cannot stop
having a boyfriend and romance now. She believes that poor people
are entitled to social pleasures and normal living.
This newspaper agrees with this version of living. The rich
have everything they want. Why can’t poor people have a little
fun? A lot of our foolish laws need changing. We do not condemn
Mrs. Brown. We rather praise her. She is living proof of a good
woman--one who is promulgating her race.
When our race increases in number to a much larger extent, we can
demand more, get more, and show our power and authority at the
polls.
This remarkable attitude, which views the sexual act as casually
as a good-night kiss, is reported by school administrators and
law-enforcement officials among Negroes across the nation. In
Philadelphia, District Attorney Victor H. Blanc in 1958 typically
reported confiscation of large quantities of pornographic pictures
among Negro pupils in the public schools; much of the material was
intended to encourage interracial “Sex Clubs” led by Negro teen-agers
who regard fornication, in the Negro newspaper’s phrase, as “social
pleasures and normal living.”
Another of Dr. Johnson’s characteristics, in the list that made
up his “stereotype” of the typical Negro, was summarized under
“law observance” as “relatively high incidence of social disorder;
drunkenness, fighting, gambling, petty stealing, etc.” Here, too,
some measurable data may be had. Nathaniel Weyl has summed up the
picture succinctly:
“For well over a century the Negro has been responsible for an
alarmingly disproportionate share of American crime. In 1950 his
felony rate was almost three times the national average. Thirty per
cent of the two million persons arrested for major crimes in 1957
were colored.
“While his contribution to all types of crime, except political
crime, has been excessive, the Negro has gravitated toward the most
serious offenses and, above all, toward crimes of violence. In recent
years he has accounted for _well over half_ the nation’s murders,
non-negligent manslaughters, aggravated assaults and robberies.”
[Emphasis supplied.]
As in the case of illegitimacy, Negro crime rates have not tended
to decline significantly with the Negro’s rising level of income
and opportunity. About 34 per cent of the convicts committed to
jail in 1910 were colored; the figure is about 30 per cent for
1960. Historically, Negro crime rates have been higher in the
more-or-less-integrated North than in the more-or-less-segregated
South. In Philadelphia, where the shockingly brutal murder of
a Korean student in 1958 prompted some candid and critical
investigations, it was found that Negro teen-agers, representing 30
per cent of the population, were guilty of 75 per cent of juvenile
crime. In one nineteen-day period given special study, Negroes were
found responsible for forty-five of fifty-three “headings,” in
which victims were savagely beaten with clubs and iron pipes; they
also were charged with thirty-two of thirty-eight murders and 340
of 437 cases of aggravated assault. Eighty per cent of the inmates
of Philadelphia prisons at that time were Negroes. The figures are
entirely comparable in New York, where one city magistrate, after
hearing an unusually shocking case of Negro violence, asked a
rhetorical question that hangs quivering in the air: “What kind of
animals do we have in this town?”
But the problem of disproportionate criminality among Negroes is
not peculiar to Harlem or South Chicago or Philadelphia, nor is
it an especially new problem. Between 1930 and 1959, when Negroes
represented about 10 per cent of the population, Negroes made up
54 per cent of those executed for crimes. And in a typical year,
substantially similar figures are reported across the nation. The
FBI’s _Uniform Crime Reports_ for 1960 provide these figures on
arrests for major crimes in 2446 cities having a population of
73,473,000:
-------------------------------------------------------------
_Per cent
_Offense Charged_ _Total_ _White_ _Negro_ Negro_
-------------------------------------------------------------
Murder and nonnegligent
homicide 4,120 1,536 2,511 60.9
Robbery 25,501 10,994 14,155 55.5
Aggravated assault 127,728 70,122 54,737 42.9
Burglary 102,536 66,130 33,536 34.7
Larceny-theft 199,063 129,158 65,063 32.7
Forcible rape 5,326 2,459 2,778 52.2
Prostitution and
commercialized vice 23,031 11,046 11,594 50.3
Other sex offenses 40,702 27,813 11,901 29.2
Narcotic drug laws 16,370 8,506 7,570 46.2
Weapons; carrying,
possessing, etc. 32,124 14,729 17,005 52.9
-------------------------------------------------------------
When it is kept in mind that the cities included in the FBI reports
constitute a fair random sample, North and South, small towns and
large, the sobering nature of these figures becomes apparent.
What can explain this dismaying tendency of the Negro toward
disproportionate criminality? The same rationalizations (with a few
ludicrous variations) are trotted out that are produced to discredit
the figures on illegitimacy. Gunnar Myrdal devoted twelve pages of
_An American Dilemma_ to scoffs, sneers, apologies, explanations,
highflown fabrications, and wildly speculative generalities, all
intended to whitewash the Negro record.
First, says Myrdal, the statistics are no good. Figures on crime
are generally inadequate, and statistics on Negro crime are
even more so. Such data generally suffer from incomplete and
inaccurate reporting, variations among States in definitions and
classifications; and in the case of the Negro, the figures are
distorted by special weaknesses owing to the caste situation and to
certain characteristics of the Negro population. “It happens that
Negroes are seldom in a position to commit ... white collar crimes
[such as tax evasion, conspiracy to violate antitrust laws, fraud
and racketeering]; they commit the crimes which much more frequently
result in apprehension and punishment.” This is a chief source of
error when attempting to compare statistics on Negro and white crime.
Myrdal then paints a picture of the South no Southerner would
recognize. For a jaw-dropping example of the strange fabrications
that have made Myrdal’s work notorious, consider the following:
In the South, inequality of justice seems to be the most important
factor in making the statistics on Negro crime and white crime
not comparable: ... [I]n any crime which remotely affects a white
man, Negroes are more likely to be arrested than are whites, more
likely to be indicted after arrest, more likely to be convicted
in court and punished. Negroes will be arrested on the slightest
suspicion, or on no suspicion at all, merely to provide witnesses
or to work during a labor shortage in violation of anti-peonage
laws. The popular belief that all Negroes are inherently criminal
operates to increase arrests, and the Negro’s lack of political
power prevents a white policeman from worrying about how many Negro
arrests he makes. Some white criminals have made use of these
prejudices to divert suspicion away from themselves onto Negroes:
for example, there are many documented cases of white robbers
blackening their faces when committing crimes. In the Southern
court, a Negro will seldom be treated seriously, and his testimony
against a white man will be ignored, if he is permitted to express
it at all. When sentenced he is usually given a heavier punishment
and probation or suspended sentence is seldom allowed him....
Myrdal goes on to remark that when white lawyers, installment
collectors, insurance agents, plantation owners, and others cheat the
Negroes of the South, they are “never” regarded as criminals. But
stealing by Negroes from whites is almost always punished as a crime.
These things occur in the North, Myrdal asserts, although in a much
smaller degree. In the North, the trouble is that the Negro has
brought certain cultural practices with him from the South. Also, the
Negro is poor. He cannot bribe policemen to let him off; he has no
influential connections; he does not know the important people who
can help him out of trouble.
In brief, Myrdal says, the statistics “do not provide a fair index
of Negro crime.” And for a typical example of the fallacies that
permeate the statistics, “the Negro rape rate, like other Negro
crime rates, is fallaciously high: white women may try to extricate
themselves from the consequences of sexual delinquency by blaming or
framing Negro men; a white woman who has a Negro lover can get rid
of him or avoid social ostracism following detection by accusing him
of rape; neurotic white women may hysterically interpret an innocent
action as an ‘attack’ by a Negro.”
In addition to the statistical distortions that result (1) from basic
discrimination against Negroes and (2) from the Negro’s poverty and
ignorance of the law, Myrdal finds a third “group of causes of Negro
crime.” This, he says, is “connected with the slavery tradition and
the caste situation.” Negroes in the South traditionally have been
permitted to pilfer small items from their employers; the practice
has imbued them with a general disrespect for property rights. And
their feeling that there is nothing wrong with petty stealing “is
strengthened by the fact that Negroes know that their white employers
are exploiting them.”
Beyond all this, Myrdal says, as a cause of “Negro crime,” is the
Negro’s hatred of whites. The revenge motive figures in Negro
muggings and headings: “Because the white man regards him as apart
from society, it is natural for a Negro to regard himself as apart.
He does not participate in making the laws in the South, and he has
little chance to enforce them. To the average lower class Negro,
at least in the South, the police, the courts, and even the law
are arbitrary and hostile to Negroes, and thus are to be avoided
or fought against. The ever-present hostility to the law and
law-enforcement agencies on the part of all Southern Negroes and
many Northern Negroes does not often manifest itself in an outbreak
against them because the risks are too great. But occasionally this
hostility does express itself, and then there is crime.”
Myrdal concludes by asserting: “We know that Negroes are not
biologically more criminal than whites. We do not know definitely
that Negroes are culturally more criminal, although we do know
that they come up against law-enforcement agencies more often. We
suspect that the ‘true’ crime rate--when extraneous influences
are held constant--is higher among Negroes. This is true at least
for such crimes as involve personal violence, petty robbery, and
sexual delinquency--because of the caste system and the slavery
tradition....”
Myrdal wrote in 1944. The statistics he struggled so wildly to
discredit have not changed significantly in the past eighteen years.
In this period, the Negro’s position in American society has improved
phenomenally; his political power has significantly increased in
most Southern cities and has become decisive in many Northern wards
and congressional districts. In both North and South, Negroes sit
on juries, appear as counsel, serve as police officers. Myrdal’s
specious and shabby rationalizations based upon “discrimination”
simply will not hold up in any national view. And of some of his
fatuous explanations (that many white criminals blacken their faces
to put blame on innocent Negroes, that white women are responsible
for a fallaciously high Negro rape rate because they frame Negro men,
that _all_ Southern Negroes are seized of an _ever-present_ hostility
to law and law enforcement) the less said, the better. Yet Myrdal
is so widely touted as the ablest authority on the American Negro
that the Supreme Court of the United States, in the _Brown_ case,
suggested that his work be “seen generally” as a support for the
court’s reasoning!
Well, the palpable truth is that many white men also are poor; they
too know frustrations, feel resentments, fear the real world they
live in. But studies of arrests by place of residence, correlated
against census data on housing, suggest no levels of criminality
in poor and underprivileged white neighborhoods that compare with
criminality in generally comparable Negro neighborhoods. Crime
always may be measured by an index of poverty, and it is true that
poverty exists far more widely among Negroes than among whites; but
if poverty were the whole explanation, or even a key explanation,
surely the remarkable increases in Negro per capita income over the
past fifty years should be reflected in some corresponding decrease
in rates of crime among the Negro people. _No such correspondence
exists._ The Negroes of America are better off materially,
culturally, and politically than any Negroid people in the world, and
their lot improves at an incredible speed. Yet there are the facts on
trends in illegitimacy; and there are the facts on trends in crime.
And the insistent _why?_ will not go away.
Nathaniel Weyl, who started his studies with an environmentalist’s
view, concludes his chapter on Negro criminality with a comment that
the character patterns disclosed by the facts are “presumably genetic
in origin.” Dr. W. C. George, head of the Department of Anatomy at
the University of North Carolina, also tends to find an explanation
in racial factors: “Whatever other virtues Negroes may have, and they
have many, all of the evidence that I know about--and there is a lot
of it--indicates that the Caucasian race is superior to the Negro
race in the creation and maintenance of what we call civilization.”
A great many white Southerners accept this thesis implicitly and
unquestioningly; they infer the innate “inferiority” of the typical
Negro, in terms of Western cultural values, simply on the basis
of their lifelong observation of the Negro people about them.
No other explanation appeals to their common sense, or to their
native prejudice, or to both. This is something they _know_, and
they profess to know it not in anthropological terms (the weight
of brains, the pigmentation of skins, the length of appendages,
the formation of skull and jaw), but in terms of ordinary human
observation.
I incline toward this view myself, but I certainly would not assert,
as Myrdal asserts the contrary, that I “know” it to be true. I would
be agreeable to accepting the temperate and tentative conclusion
voiced by Professor G. M. Morant, of England, in a most unlikely
place--an essay in UNESCO’s _Race and Prejudice_ (Columbia, 1961).
The volume as a whole is almost worthless to the objective student;
most of the essays are no more than special pleading by propagandists
against racial prejudice. But Morant examines the evidence of
intelligence tests and other data with a scientist’s objectivity, and
he concludes by saying this:
“There seems to be no reason why the general rule regarding variation
within and between groups should not apply to mental as well as to
physical characters. If variable characters of the former kind showed
identical distributions for all racial populations, that would be a
situation unparalleled, as far as is known, as regards any physical
character in man or in any other animal. It seems to be impossible
to evade the conclusion that some racial differences in mental
characters must be expected. Existing evidence may not be extensive
and cogent enough to reveal them, but it must be inferred that some
exist....”
Morant makes the point, in analyzing intelligence-test scores, that
obviously white and Negro scores overlap. Consistently, the most
superior Negroes will score higher as a group than the most inferior
whites as a group. Moreover, the difference between the average
scores of two racial populations may be quite small compared with
the range of scores in either group. But even when this is so, says
Morant, “there may be a marked difference between the relative
frequencies in the population of individuals having extreme values
of the measurement.” And this distinction may be important in the
case of some mental characteristics: “There may be almost equal
proportions of stupid, mediocre, and able people in two populations;
even so, exceptional ability may be found with a frequency of 1 in
1,000 in one group, and of 1 in 10,000 in the other. Having a larger
proportion of exceptionally able members may be a factor which tells
decisively in favor of a population in the course of centuries or
millenniums.”
The Liberal social anthropologists, to be sure, have denounced this
reasonable hypothesis out of hand; and by effectively dominating the
professional field, they have managed to elevate their own opinions
to the status of truth, to promote speculation to the level of fact,
and to convert surmise deftly into incontrovertible proof. I believe
they have overdone it. They have lost their own case by their own
disgraceful intemperance and intolerance of dissent; they protest
too much; they cover up; they propagandize; they set out not to seek
truth, but “to combat racial prejudice.”
At the same time, I would insert a comment that some of the more
intemperate protagonists on the segregationist Right have fallen into
the same errors of positivism and unqualified statement. They have
tended to think too much in blanket terms--in literal blacks and
whites--and they have regularly overestimated the factors of heredity
and underestimated the factors of environment. Their position would
be improved if they simply acknowledged that the question of the
Negro’s innate inferiority has not been proved and hence is still
open.
In terms of the problem immediately at hand, the question of whether
the Negro’s shortcomings are “innate” seems to me largely irrelevant
anyhow. The issue is not likely to be proved to the satisfaction of
either side any time soon; it may not be susceptible of proof at all.
Whether these characteristics are inherited or acquired, they _are_.
And communities North and South (but especially in the South, and
more especially still, in the rural South) must cope with conditions
as they find them. The ruins of Zimbadwe are a long way from Prince
Edward County, Virginia, and the finest analysis of electroencephalic
findings among the Zulus is of small importance in teaching a class
of Alabama sixth-graders. The arguments of anthropology are of
interest to the South, and I would not wish to leave any impression
that would minimize their importance; the fear of ultimate racial
interbreeding, encouraged by prospective generations of desegregated
and integrated school systems, is a very real fear in the South and
not an imagined one. If these Negro characteristics are innate, the
white Southerner sees nothing but disaster to his race in risking
an accelerated intermingling of blood lines. And even if these
Negro characteristics are not innate, the white Southerner wants no
intimate association with them anyhow. And he is determined not to
let his children be guinea pigs for any man’s social experiment.
VII
The second of the South’s principal arguments, related to
anthropological considerations but of more immediate application,
may be termed the argument of practicality: Even if it be true, as
the liberal social anthropologists insist, that there is no innate
cultural or intellectual inferiority in the Negro race as such, the
plain fact is that here and now, there are immense differences in the
educational achievements and apparent aptitudes of the two races;
and these differences, especially in small rural communities, make
true integration of public schools an impossibility. Beyond this, the
educational needs of white and Negro children in the South, in terms
of the lives they will lead and the employment they predictably will
find, are quite different; and these differences, especially in the
small counties, create formidable problems of curriculum. Finally,
the temper, and prejudices, and feelings of the white taxpayers, who
overwhelmingly bear the bulk of public school costs, simply cannot
be discounted altogether; political realities have to be considered,
and grave thought must be given, as a practical matter, to the social
upheaval that inevitably would accompany massive desegregation of
public schools in those areas of the South where Negro populations
are greatest and traditions of racial separation are most deeply
ingrained.
As Otto Klineberg points out in _Characteristics of the American
Negro_, efforts to test the intelligence or the educational aptitude
of Negro children go back a long way. In 1897, G. R. Stetson gave
memory tests to fourth- and fifth-graders in the District of
Columbia; the Negro pupils, who averaged a year and a half older than
the whites, proved superior in memorizing three out of four stanzas
of poetry. Truly is it said that the first shall be last and the
last shall be first, for Stetson’s findings of 1897 represent one of
the very few such inquiries in which Negroes have scored higher than
whites. Since then, an exhaustive series of tests almost invariably
have produced data pointing just the other way.
In 1913, A. C. Strong studied white and Negro school children of
Columbia, S. C., and found the colored children mentally younger. The
following year, B. A. Phillips reported on an analysis of twenty-nine
white and twenty-nine Negro children who had been equated in terms of
home environment, and found such a difference in mentality between
the two groups that he wondered if they should be instructed under
the same curriculum. In 1916, G. O. Ferguson tested white and Negro
pupils of Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Newport News, Va., and found
the superiority of the white group indubitable. In this same study he
attempted further to classify the Negro subjects according to skin
color (pure Negro, three-fourths Negro, mulatto, and quadroon), and
found a plain correlation between higher scores and lighter skins.
Intelligence testing by racial groups was launched on a large scale
with World War I. As an aid to military authorities, three separate
tests were devised. The first, known as Army A, never was very widely
used; it contained some four hundred items and featured two tests, of
immediate memory and cancellation, which proved to be impracticable.
Analyses of findings were made, however, by Ferguson and by Robert
M. Yerkes, of 10,276 Negro soldiers and 38,628 white soldiers tested
on Army A at Camp Lee and Camp Dix. The median score among Negro
recruits ranged from 14.8 at Lee to 53 at Dix, the white recruits
from 116 at Lee to 171 at Dix.
In an effort to devise a more useful test, a committee of five
psychologists, led by Yerkes, was appointed by the American
Psychological Association in April 1917. They put together tests
that came to be known as Army Alpha and Army Beta. The tests, which
brought together the most advanced psychological knowledge of
their day, still are widely respected by psychologists forty-five
years later. Henry E. Garrett, professor emeritus of psychology at
Columbia University, has said of them that “owing to the size of the
groups and the lack of special selection, the army test data yield
probably the fairest and most unbiased comparison of Negro and white
intelligence which we possess.”
The Alpha test was divided into eight sections, testing the
examinee’s ability in following directions, arithmetic problems,
practical judgment, synonyms and antonyms, disarranged sentences,
completion of number series, analogies, and general information. The
psychologists’ committee realized, however, that because of its heavy
reliance upon literacy and cultural factors, the Alpha test would
tell Army examiners little about the intelligence and capacity of
recruits whose schooling was limited and whose cultural background
was poor. Hence the Beta test was devised, as a nonlanguage test on
which all illiterates could compete equally.
The average score of the white soldier on the Alpha test was 59,
that of the Northern Negro 39, and that of the Southern Negro 12.
The better educational equipment of the whites presumably might
account for some of this astonishing difference, without considering
any questions of innate ability at all. But this superior equipment
did not figure on the Beta test. And on Beta, the whites averaged
43, the Northern Negro 33, and the Southern Negro 20. Analyzing
these Beta findings in one study of men tested at Camp Grant, M.
R. Trabue concluded that the average Northern Negro recruit had an
ability to learn new things about equivalent to that of the average
eleven-year-old white boy, and the average Southern Negro recruit a
mental capacity at the nine-year-old level.
Notably, the figures on Negro “overlapping” were not significantly
different for the two tests. It was found that only 27 per cent of
the Negroes exceeded the white average score on Alpha. On Beta,
the figure was 29 per cent. As Dr. McGurk has pointed out, if the
Negroes’ comparatively poor scores were entirely a consequence of
social and economic differences, a lessening of these differences
should have produced, in the Beta test, a corresponding increase
in the Negro overlap. Put another way: “An improvement in cultural
opportunities should result in an improvement in the capacity for
education. If cultural opportunities are not important in determining
capacity for education, improving the cultural opportunities will
have no effect on capacity for education.” And Dr. McGurk, it should
be remembered, is a Villanova social scientist who has devoted a
lifetime to research in this field.
The massive statistics of the World War I tests have served as grist
for the mills of a hundred psychologists and social anthropologists.
Those of the equalitarian school have done some curious things
with the figures, in a strained effort to prove that significant
differences in racial scores are related solely to environment and
not at all to heredity. The student who inquires into the literature
scarcely can pick up an equalitarian book that does not offer the
following table:
-----------------------------------------------------------
SOUTHERN WHITES AND NORTHERN NEGROES,
ARMY TESTS, 1918
_Whites_ _Negroes_
_State_ _Median score_ _State_ _Median score_
-----------------------------------------------------------
Mississippi 41.25 Pennsylvania 42.00
Kentucky 41.50 New York 45.00
Arkansas 41.55 Illinois 47.35
Georgia 42.12 Ohio 49.50
-----------------------------------------------------------
Klineberg, who used this table in his 1944 work, says the comparison
shows that Northern Negroes “are superior to the white groups from a
number of Southern States.”
Taken at face value, that is certainly one conclusion that might be
drawn, at least as to four Southern States, but the figures merit a
closer look. What Klineberg did, as Garrett has shown, was to take
the four Southern States where the white medians were _lowest_ and
compare them with the four Northern States where the Negro medians
were _highest_. Beyond demonstrating that Negroes in some Northern
States scored higher than whites in some Southern States, this widely
reproduced table tells us little. Moreover, Klineberg--and Montagu,
and Benedict, and others who are so fond of this data--do not present
the figures from the four Northern States that might truly have
significance in terms of local problems of public education. Garrett,
whose computations of medians differ slightly from Klineberg’s, puts
the data together in this fashion:
---------------------------------------------------------
_Number Tested_ _White_ _Negro_
_State_ _White_ _Negro_ _Median_ _Median_
---------------------------------------------------------
Pennsylvania 3,089 498 64.6 41.5
New York 2,843 850 64.0 44.5
Illinois 2,056 578 63.0 46.9
Ohio 2,318 152 66.7 48.8
---------------------------------------------------------
Garrett then makes the self-evident point that Negroes in these four
States scored as far below white soldiers _from the same States_ as
they scored below whites in the country as a whole. The student who
wants to dig more deeply into these World War I findings will find
them fully reported in professional literature. Audrey Shuey’s _The
Testing of Negro Intelligence_ summarizes the data and provides an
extensive bibliography of work done on the figures.
It is curious that so much labor has been spent on the World War I
figures, and relatively so little on the more up-to-date data from
World War II and Korea. Yet from one point of view this is not so
curious either: In the thirty-six years between 1917 and 1943, the
American Negro experienced prodigious gains in educational, cultural,
economic, and social opportunities. Surely, it might be thought,
these gains would have been reflected in some significant improvement
in his military test scores. No such improvement can be detected.
Nathaniel Weyl has summed up the facts:
“A comparison of Army General Classification Test (AGCT) scores of
white and Negro enlisted men in military service in March, 1945,
shows that 6.3 per cent of the whites, but only 1.0 per cent of the
Negroes, were in Group I (very superior) and that 39.7 per cent of
the whites, but only 7.4 per cent of the Negroes, were in the first
two (better than average) categories. On the other hand, only 26.9
per cent of the whites, as contrasted with 77.7 per cent of the
Negroes (more than three-fourths of them), were in the two bottom
(inferior and very inferior) groups.”
In World War I, Weyl continues, the Negro overlap on the combined
tests was 13.5 per cent--that is, 13½ Negroes in 100 scored as well
as the average white man. By the time of World War II, the overlap
had dropped to 12 per cent, and if the scores of mental rejects are
included for both races, to only 10 per cent. Still more embarrassing
to the equalitarians, their precious comparisons of World War I
between Northern Negroes and Southern whites tend to dissolve in
the findings of World War II. Weyl summarizes a comparison between
Negroes examined in the First Command Area (New England), where
Negroes had the highest median, with white recruits examined in the
Fourth Command Area (Southern), where white medians were lowest.
Some 34 per cent of the Southern whites made scores of superior or
very superior; only 9 per cent of the Northern Negroes were in these
brackets.
Finally, on the matter of AGCT scores, mention may be made of an
unpublished master’s thesis by B. E. Fulk of the University of
Illinois; the paper is cited by Shuey in her encompassing survey
of the field. Fulk obtained data on 2174 white and 2010 Negro
enlisted men examined by the Army Air Force Service Command. He then
correlated their AGCT scores in terms of the years of education they
had experienced. It may well be true that the Negroes here tested had
attended poorer schools than the whites; but to persons interested
in understanding some of the real and practical problems of school
desegregation, Fulk’s tabulations will be rewarding (see page 78).
If the formidable gaps shown by those figures do not persuade the
South’s critics of the difficult problems implicit in welding
together two country high schools, one white, the other Negro,
perhaps no evidence would persuade them. Yet abundant other evidence
is widely available.
-------------------------------------------------------------
_Years of _Median _Median
Education_ White_ Negro_
-------------------------------------------------------------
0 82.45 59.35
1 91.20 58.40
2 88.45 57.75
3 91.20 57.60
4 90.65 59.80
5 90.35 54.65
6 87.95 59.60
7 85.40 64.45
8 94.50 69.25
9 100.70 73.35
10 102.50 78.95
11 107.95 85.95
12 109.20 93.05
------- -------
Total 95.10 68.95
--------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Shuey has put the facts together in a book that cannot be
overlooked by serious students of the desegregation problem. She
is head of the Department of Psychology at Randolph-Macon Woman’s
College in Virginia. Her massive labors have had a stunning impact
upon the more idealistic advocates of immediate integration. Here
in cold statistical tables, unwarmed by subjective opinion, she
has summarized more than forty years of investigation into Negro
intelligence. These are not her findings; they are the findings of
scholars who have done original or independent research. No matter
how these findings may be explained away (and the NAACP has retained
a committee of psychologists now seeking desperately to explain them
away), the figures speak tellingly of the problems that educators
must face in mixing the two races massively in the same classrooms.
The literature discloses that at the preschool level, there is a
marked but not unmanageable difference between white and Negro
aptitudes. A typical Stanford-Binet test of five-year-olds, for
example, may turn up a median of 112 for white children, 95.8 for
Negro children. The gap is dismayingly wide, but it can be coped with.
Thereafter, as the children move into upper grades, the tendency is
for the gap to grow steadily greater. Dr. Shuey made an analysis of
101 tests given to Negro elementary-school children from one end of
the country to the other. Some of these tests were given by Negro
psychologists, in an effort to improve the rapport between examiner
and subject. In other investigations, careful efforts were made to
equate the home backgrounds of white and Negro subjects. All told,
the 101 investigations cover findings on 51,000 colored children, and
provide 310 comparisons for relative standing of colored and white.
“In 297 of the comparisons,” Dr. Shuey notes, “the colored children
scored the lower; in 144 they were lower than the white norms.”
Dr. McGurk’s analysis of the professional literature in this field
closely parallels Dr. Shuey’s report. Between 1935 and 1950, he has
stated, sixty-three articles appeared in professional journals of
psychology dealing with Negro-white test-score differences. _In all
sixty-three of them_, the average test score of the Negro subjects
was found to be lower than the average test score of the white
subjects with whom they were compared. Six of these investigations
are regarded by McGurk as especially significant:
1. A study of a group of Canadian Negroes and whites in 1939 by H.
A. Tanser. The Negro children tested were the descendants of slaves
who had escaped from the South prior to and during the Civil War.
Their social and economic opportunities had been generally equal
to those of whites in the area. Yet the findings of three standard
psychological tests administered to children in grades 1-8 found the
Negro averages far below the white averages at every age and every
grade. For the total groups, only 13 to 20 per cent of the Negroes
overlapped the white average, and in no case did the overlap exceed
20 per cent.
2. A study of white and Negro children in a poor section of rural
Virginia, done by M. Bruce in 1940. In order to eliminate the factor
of social and economic differences, the author first administered a
test of socio-economic status, and then paired off her subjects so
that each member of a pair, one Negro child and one white child, had
the same socio-economic score. Negro overlapping on three separate
tests ranged between 15 per cent and 20 per cent.
3. A study by Dr. Shuey of white and Negro college students in
New York, in 1942. Again, the Negro and white students were first
given socio-economic tests in order to pair them off. The Negro
overlap amounted to 18 per cent. Of this investigation, Dr. McGurk
says: “Considering that this was a highly selected group of college
students, such low overlapping is surprising. It does not lend
credence to the belief that socio-economic factors are responsible
for the Negro-white differences in psychological test performance.”
4. A study of white and Negro kindergarten children in Minneapolis,
1944, done by F. Brown. The test scores found a 31 per cent
overlapping. (At very early ages, overlap always is greater because
tests deal more with performance and with sensory-motor responses,
and less with verbal skills).
5. A study by T. F. Rhoads and associates of white and Negro children
at the age of three. This was a very detailed study, in which each
of the subjects was clinically examined from birth until the time he
was administered a psychological test. Socio-economic factors were
reported to be generally equal for the entire group of subjects. The
overlapping amounted to 30 per cent.
6. A study by McGurk himself of Negro and white high school seniors
in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Again, Negroes and whites were
matched for social and economic status by pairing a white subject
with each Negro subject so that both members of a pair were identical
or equivalent for fourteen different socio-economic factors. These
students then took a test composed half of “cultural questions,” and
half of “non-cultural questions.” McGurk’s finding: “In spite of
the equivalence of socio-economic factors, 29 per cent of the Negro
subjects overlapped the average total score of the white subjects.
This is almost identical with the overlapping reported in the Alpha
and Beta tests of World War I. There is hardly any question about
the socio-economic superiority of this 1951 group of Negroes when
compared with the Negroes of World War I. Yet, relative to white
subjects, the intervening improvements in social and economic
opportunities of the Negroes had not improved their psychological
test performance at all.”
In 1953, Dr. McGurk published an additional study in the _Journal of
Abnormal and Social Psychology_, “On White and Negro Test Performance
and Socio-Economic Factors.” Here he reclassified the subjects of his
1951 study, in order to compare the 25 per cent of each race who
might be regarded as a “high group” and as a “low group” in terms of
socio-economic factors. Rearrangement of the data made no difference.
It became apparent that socio-economic factors had not made the
two groups equally proficient in psychological tests. “The average
score of the high Negro group was very much lower than the average
score of the whites of equivalent socio-economic status. In terms of
Negro overlap, only 18 per cent of these Negro children of excellent
socio-economic background obtained test scores that equalled or
exceeded the average white score.”
Assuming that the liberal social anthropologists are right in
what they say, that social and economic forces are of paramount
importance, McGurk comments, “There should have been no differences
between Negroes and whites in any of these comparisons. As it
actually turned out, the difference between Negroes and whites is
much greater when both groups are of high socio-economic status than
when the racial groups are of deprived socio-economic status.”
Further analysis of McGurk’s 1951 study in terms of the “cultural
questions” and the “noncultural” questions totally disproved
the notion that cultural questions on these intelligence tests
unduly hold back the Negro in his performance. Taking the cultural
questions alone, it was found that 24 per cent of the high Negro
group overlapped the average scores of the high white group. On the
noncultural questions, where it might have been expected that the
Negroes would do better, they did worse: Barely one out of five of
the high Negro group overlapped the high white group. Comparing the
two low groups, McGurk found that the low Negro group actually had
an insignificantly higher average score than the low white group on
the cultural questions, with an overlap of about 55 per cent. On
the noncultural questions, the average of the low white group was
significantly greater than that of the low Negro group. There was an
overlap of about 29 per cent.
McGurk has summed up his conclusions in this fashion:
Regardless of our emotional attachment to the school desegregation
problem, certain facts must be faced. First, as far as
psychological test performance is a measure of capacity for
education, Negroes as a group do not possess as much of it as
whites as a group. This has been demonstrated over and over.
Next, we must realize that, since 1918, the vast improvements in
the social and economic status of the Negro have not changed his
relationship to the whites regarding capacity for education. This
is not to say that this relationship cannot be changed; it says
merely that it has not been changed....
Thirdly, as far as our knowledge of the problem goes, the
improvements in the social and economic opportunities have only
increased the differences between Negroes and whites. This
is because such improvements have been given to both racial
groups--not only to the Negro--and the whites have profited the
more from them. This serves to emphasize the former statement
that a fruitful approach to racial equality cannot follow the
lines of social and economic manipulation. There is something more
important, more basic, to the race problem than differences in
external opportunity.
Dr. McGurk’s conclusions, it should be said in fairness (even in
this partisan brief), have been widely denounced by his equalitarian
colleagues. Following publication of his 1956 statement in _U. S.
News & World Report_, eighteen social scientists united in a rebuttal
assertion that “given similar degrees of cultural opportunity
to realize their potentialities, the average achievement of the
members of each ethnic group is about the same.” And in the Spring
1958, issue of _Harvard Educational Review_, William M. McCord, an
assistant professor of sociology at Stanford University, and Nicholas
J. Demerath, III, of Harvard, a senior student, returned to the
attack on McGurk.
In my own view, the rejoinders of McCord and Demerath are remarkably
feeble. The investigations they cite, in an effort to refute McGurk’s
conclusions, provide no refutation at all. Their own study of
“predelinquent” and normal boys in Cambridge-Somerville, Mass., is
so affected by subjective evaluations that it contributes little
to an objective appraisal of conditions that confront school
administrators elsewhere. (They attempted to establish a correlation
between the boys’ intelligence and their social class, parental
education, “home atmosphere,” and “personality of the boys’ fathers”;
other factors dealt with the subjects’ homes--cohesive, quarrelsome,
quarrelsome-neglecting, or broken--and whether the boys’ fathers were
loving, passive, cruel, neglecting, or absent.) In any event, most of
their elaborately tabulated findings tend merely to support McGurk’s
own conclusion that at the lowest social levels, white and Negro test
scores are not significantly different.
The evidence put together by Shuey and McGurk is solid,
dispassionate, unbiased, overwhelming; it cannot be disregarded--not,
that is, if one wishes to gain any real understanding of the problems
that confront local school boards over much of the South. To pull
the general figures down to a single, specific case study, consider
the findings of some tests administered in Dallas in 1954-55. There
more than 1600 Negro pupils and almost 5700 white pupils were tested
in the first grade on their general readiness for learning--on
their ability to pay attention, follow directions, handle crayons
and pencils, understand and use language, and so on. These were the
findings:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
_Number of _Per cent _Number of _Per cent
Negro Negro White White
Children_ Children_ _Category_ Children_ Children_
-----------------------------------------------------------------
15 .92 Superior 576 10.14
105 6.47 High Normal 1,503 26.50
299 18.43 Average 1,814 31.96
677 41.71 Low Normal 1,391 24.50
527 32.47 Poor Risk 392 6.90
-----------------------------------------------------------------
In sum, 37 per cent of the white first-graders scored in the “high
normal” and “superior” groups, against only 7 per cent of the Negro
first-graders. At the other end of the scale, 31 per cent of the
white pupils scored in the “low normal” and “poor risk” groups,
against 74 per cent of the Negro pupils.
For another specific example, consider the findings in Virginia
among pupils of an older age group. Over a period of five successive
years, between 1949-50 and 1953-54, the State Department of Education
administered the Iowa Silent Reading Test to all eighth-graders in
the Virginia public school system. This is a standardized achievement
test in reading, employed by school systems throughout the country
to discover certain facts of immediate, practical importance to
classroom teachers: How well do the children read? How well do they
understand? The tests in Virginia were given in May of each year,
when all of the children had a grade placement of 8.8 (eighth year,
eighth month). Scores on the Iowa test are calibrated to match
the grade placement, so that a pupil who scores a reading-grade
equivalent of 8.7 would be one month retarded in achievement, and a
pupil who scores a reading-grade equivalent of 8.9 would be one month
advanced in achievement.
This is what the Virginia tests found in May 1954, the month of the
_Brown_ decision (findings were not significantly different in the
four preceding years): The median white child in the county schools
was about half a year behind the achievement level he should have
reached; he was reading at a level of 8.3 (eighth grade, third
month). But the median Negro child in the county schools was reading
at a level of 6.2 (sixth grade, second month). The top one-fourth of
the white children (75th percentile) were reading at a level of the
tenth grade, third month, or better; but the top one-fourth of the
Negro children were not even at the 8.8 level--the 75th percentile
among the Negro pupils was found at 7.5.
Scores on the Virginia tests were higher in the city schools, but
among the Negro pupils, not much higher. In the cities, the median
white eighth-grader was found to be reading at a level of the ninth
grade, second month; the median Negro eighth-grader scored 6.5. In
less statistical language, this means simply that in terms of reading
skills, which are the foundation of all other academic skills,
Virginia’s white eighth-graders as a group were found in 1954 to
be from two years to nearly three full years ahead of the Negro
eighth-graders as a group. Subsequent tests, administered on a more
limited scale since 1954, have shown no material change.
Now, how is one to organize a viable public school--a completely
desegregated school--under such conditions as these? If one is
the superintendent of schools in the District of Columbia, one
can cope with what Dr. Carl F. Hansen has described as “the
enormous educational problem of upgrading large numbers of
educationally handicapped children” by a variety of devices: Squads
of psychiatrists, platoons of remedial-reading instructors, a
“four-track” system, and the like. And if one spends enough money,
and has enough pupils and buildings to permit some shuffling around
among schools, and pays salaries high enough to keep some of the most
competent teachers in the country, one can accomplish a good deal.
But how many rural counties in the South, where the _total_ school
population may number only 2000 or 2500, can possibly apply the
drastic remedies found necessary in Washington?
Consider the schools of Washington, D. C. The capital is the
showcase of the nation in terms of desegregation. If genuinely
“mixed” schools are to work anywhere, they should work best in the
District of Columbia, where every factor combines to produce the
most favorable opportunity: The political climate of a Federal
administration anxious to achieve integration, the immense resources
of a lavish school budget, the cultural amenities freely available
to all children as an adjunct to learning, the absence of racial
discrimination in employment, the untypically high incomes and job
status of many Negro families. It is entirely reasonable to assume
that pupils in the Washington schools, as a group, should not be
merely average, or slightly above average; they should in fact lead
the entire country. Moreover, it seems a fair assumption that the
exodus of white families from the District has tended to leave behind
those white children who in general are less able mentally and more
nearly on the Negro’s cultural level. If Negro pupils are to show
up well anywhere, they should show up well here. The facts indicate
nothing of the kind.
The District of Columbia desegregated its schools in September
1954, following the Supreme Court’s opinion the preceding May. In
October 1955, after a year of experience with desegregation, the
Stanford Advanced Reading and Arithmetic Tests were given to some
4600 eighth-grade pupils in the Washington public schools--1600 white
pupils and 3000 Negro pupils. The findings in Washington almost
exactly paralleled the findings in Virginia: Two-thirds of the Negro
children were found to be reading at the sixth-grade level _or below_
(21 per cent of the Negro eighth-graders, indeed, were reading at the
fifth-grade level, and 22 per cent were reading at the fourth-grade
level). Only 12 per cent of the white eighth-graders were at the
sixth-grade level or below, and 54 per cent of the white pupils were
at the tenth-grade level or above.
Shocked officials of the District of Columbia plunged headlong into
remedial programs. Their herculean labors have been reported widely
and sympathetically. At once, the four-track system was devised, and
pupils systematically were assigned to (1) an honors program, (2) a
general college-preparatory program, (3) a program for pupils not
planning to go to college, and (4) a remedial basic curriculum for
slow-learning pupils. One effect was to achieve a very substantial
resegregation, for the great bulk of those on tracks 1 and 2 turned
out to be white pupils, and the great bulk of those on tracks 3 and 4
turned out to be Negro pupils. The resegregation process was helped
along materially by Washington’s younger white families, who fled the
District by the thousands. In 1950, Washington’s schools were almost
evenly balanced, 50-50, in white and colored enrollment; ten years
later, white pupils constituted 20 per cent, Negro pupils 80 per
cent, of the enrollment. Remedial classes for slow learners, in which
teaching specialists work with groups averaging no more than eighteen
per class, have been swiftly stepped up; there were seventy-four
such classes in 1954; the number grew to 225 in the 1959-60 session.
The reading-clinic staff increased from twelve to thirty-two in that
period of time, and a special Division of Pupil Appraisal more than
doubled with the addition of a dozen school psychologists, clinical
psychologists, and psychiatric social workers. New batteries of
achievement tests were administered every year.
At the close of the school year in 1959, five full years after racial
discrimination had been obliterated from the Washington schools,
Dr. Hansen released some figures on how things were going. To the
integrationist Washington _Post_, reporting happily on the data,
things were going marvelously well: “District pupils’ performance on
standardized tests this year topped last year’s scores in 15 of the
27 subjects tested, School Superintendent Carl F. Hansen reported
yesterday.” The cheery tone of the _Post’s_ story was somewhat
belied by the glum figures themselves. Washington’s sixth-graders
had managed to achieve median scores in spelling, language, and
arithmetical computation exactly matching--no more--the national
norms for these three sixth-grade tests. Medians on the other
twenty-four tests were below national norms, in some instances by as
much as a full year. Ninth-graders who should have scored a median of
9.4 (ninth year, fourth month) in computation and paragraph meaning
scored 8.3 and 8.4 respectively. Dr. Hansen’s report on tests at the
third-grade and fifth-grade levels has special interest:
_National _District Median Scores_
_Grade_ _Subject_ Norm_ _55-56_ _56-57_ _57-58_ _58-59_
3 Paragraph meaning 3.5 2.3 2.5 2.9 3.1
3 Word meaning 3.5 2.5 2.6 3.1 3.1
3 Spelling 3.5 2.5 3.0 3.1 3.2
3 Arith. reasoning 3.5 2.4 2.8 2.8 3.2
3 Arith. computation 3.5 2.6 2.7 2.9 3.2
5 Paragraph meaning 5.1 3.8 4.1 4.3 4.2
5 Word meaning 5.1 4.1 4.5 4.6 4.4
5 Language 5.1 4.2 4.5 4.6 4.4
5 Spelling 5.1 4.2 4.3 4.8 4.5
5 Arith. reasoning 5.1 4.2 4.5 4.6 4.5
5 Arith. computation 5.1 3.9 4.1 4.6 4.1
It should not escape notice that the Washington children whose median
scores are shown in the foregoing table never had known a day of
legally segregated schooling. The Negro pupils here tested never had
suffered the school discrimination likely to affect their hearts and
minds in a fashion never to be undone. These pupils, on the contrary,
had had the benefit of all the special attention that could be given
them by a school administration frantically eager to demonstrate
the glories of integration. No resource of guidance and special
teaching, no visual aid or teaching technique had been denied them.
Yet there are the scores: Not a single test in Washington’s third
and fifth grades produced a median equal to the national norm. The
fifth-graders, backsliding, did not even equal fifth-grade scores the
preceding year.
It is perhaps needless to dwell further upon the findings of
intelligence and achievement tests beyond commenting briefly upon
some of the flimsy efforts the equalitarians make to discredit
them. One objection is that the Negro child has no “motivation” to
do well on them; but at the younger age levels especially, this is
pure conjecture. It also is complained that frequently the tests
are administered to Negro children by white examiners, and that an
essential rapport thereby is denied them; but this was not true of
the tests in Washington, and it has not been true of many other
investigations. The most frequent objection is that tests tend to
compare white and colored children of unequal social and economic
background; but abundant evidence is available of investigations in
which subjects have been “paired” by every imaginable criterion,
and almost without exception these tests show the same lamentable
contrasts in white and Negro scores.
Otto Klineberg has attempted to dismiss all the findings: “Until
and unless the _same_ education is given to both races, comparisons
will be unfair.” But it manifestly is impossible to give the _same_
education to any two groups. All that one can do is to provide the
same textbooks, the same teaching aids, teachers with the same degree
of education, and physical facilities generally comparable--but even
then, identity of total educational opportunity could not possibly
be achieved. The various tests now being administered in school
systems across the country are as fair and objective as competent
psychologists and educators can make them; and the bleak, undeniable
fact, confirmed repeatedly in school districts both North and South,
is that colored children regularly score at lower levels than the
white children of their communities. Thoughtful students of the
difficult problem before the South will comprehend what the evidence
means in terms of the real and practical obstacles to welding
together white and Negro schools in rural areas below the Potomac.
Other very real difficulties merit reflection also. The disputations
of social scientists cannot be considered in a vacuum, nor the
findings of achievement tests treated as so many punched cards for
an IBM machine. These are _children_ we are concerned with, white
and Negro alike, and the fact is (I do not argue the goodness or
badness of the fact; I merely cite its existence) that white and
Negro children in the South have many quite different educational
requirements. The essentially dual and separate society of the South
cannot be dissolved overnight by court decree. For years to come in
the South, the practice of law and medicine, the handling of banking
and finance, the sale of stocks and bonds, the management of large
retail and wholesale enterprises, and the administration of commerce
and government will continue to be overwhelmingly restricted to white
persons. This is not to say that many able Negroes are not engaged
in these fields now; they are, and their number is increasing, but
they are conspicuous exceptions. In rural areas especially, where
professional and business opportunities naturally are severely
limited, the realities of adult opportunity are even more striking.
All this has to be considered practically in terms of curriculum
planning, guidance, teaching emphasis, and the like. Nothing very
significant is accomplished, really, in offering physics or calculus
to rural Negro boys who intend to drop out at the ninth-grade
level and go to work farming or cutting pulpwood. Negro girls who
realistically expect to find employment in a tobacco stemmery,
a laundry, a bakery, or in domestic service have educational
requirements materially different from those of their white
counterparts. The impatient theoretician, unwilling even to attempt
to understand a social order he so thoroughly disapproves, doubtless
will be repelled by this line of reasoning. But the reasoning has a
way of making sense in rural county seats.
A point is made of the exceptional Negro students. What of them?
Why should a brilliant and ambitious colored youngster be held
back by the relative ineptitude of his typical colored classmates?
My answer is that he should not be held back, and I believe that
in the course of time, this will be the answer of the South as a
whole. When colored students appear who demonstrate the intellectual
ability to compete at top levels with their white counterparts, I am
wholly agreeable to any plan that would bring them, by transfer, to
the finest high schools for miles around. Virginia has just such a
program slowly formulating in its plan of “Freedom of Choice.” But I
would suggest that one consequence of such transfers of exceptional
children, in the foreseeable future, would be to deny the slower
Negro pupils the example and stimulation of superior students
of their own race. The tendency would be further to reduce the
achievement levels of the colored schools as such. But I would leave
such decisions to the pupils and their parents themselves.
I have attempted to set forth two practical objections to school
desegregation in the South, and especially in the rural South--first,
the demonstrably lower levels of aptitude and achievement on the
Negro’s part, and second, the demonstrably different opportunities
and occupations for which most colored pupils realistically must
prepare themselves. A third difficulty involves the teaching staffs.
The massive desegregation of Southern schools predictably would have
a catastrophic effect upon the thousands of Negro men and women who
now enjoy, within their race, relatively high status and relatively
good incomes as public school teachers. In many areas of the South,
as I have said, attitudes are changing and softening, as white
parents discover there is a level of token desegregation that is not
intolerable to them. This tendency, I feel certain, will increase
year by year. But I cannot yet foresee the day, in the greatest part
of the South, when white parents by and large will accept Negro
teachers and Negro principals over their children. This would demand
one more subtle and unwelcome shifting of gears; it would carry
the social revolution beyond the point of an uneasy “equality” of
pupils in a classroom, and would make the white child subject to
Negro masters. The efforts of a Federal court to compel employment
of Negro teachers who would preside over heavily “mixed” classrooms
would be bitterly resented, and the resentment would manifest itself
in wholesale withdrawals and school abandonments. I venture the
flat prediction, on the basis of personal conversations with white
families who have moved out of Washington, that this difficulty
would be seen as a last-straw condition. But the alternative to the
employment of Negro teachers in massively desegregated schools is to
discharge the Negro teachers and to replace them with white teachers.
This would be cruelly unfair; but in any unhappy election between
preserving the jobs of some Negro schoolteachers and preserving a
local school system itself (which involves preservation of the good
will of white parents and taxpayers), the jobs will go.
This line of discussion brings us to a fourth practical difficulty
that would accompany massive desegregation in the South: the
predictable difficulty in employing _white_ teachers for racially
mixed classrooms. New York, Philadelphia, and Washington have run
into this constantly. Dr. Hansen has disclosed in the _Teachers’
College Record_ (October 1960) that Washington’s school system
employed 579 temporary teachers in 1954-55. By 1959-60, this number
had grown to 1250. “It is difficult,” he concedes, “to find white
teachers psychologically prepared to take jobs in predominantly Negro
schools, with the result that the source of applicants tends to
become more and more restricted.” And if Washington has this problem,
with the high salaries and fringe benefits and physical facilities
and cultural amenities it can offer a prospective teacher, what may
we reasonably expect at the branch-heads?
One of the problems in this area, acknowledged even by Otto
Klineberg, is the language barrier that so often baffles a white
teacher in attempting to communicate effectively with a Negro child.
“Obviously the Southern Negro speaks English,” says Klineberg in
_Characteristics of the American Negro_, “but equally obviously, his
English is not similar to, or the equal of, the English spoken by
the average white.” Many other observers have made the same point.
The Negro inflection, pronunciation, word-choice, and accent are
quite different; and in the case of the South Carolina gullah, these
characteristics make speech almost incomprehensible. White teachers,
with jobs widely available to them, simply would rather not get
involved in this.
These teachers have other objections, too. As the record of hearings
before a House subcommittee in 1956 makes vividly clear, many white
teachers are simply appalled by the sexual mores and the violent
attitudes of some of the Negro pupils in desegregated schools. One
witness after another appeared before the committee to testify
to the inordinate amount of time that had to be spent simply in
maintaining discipline. Adolescent sex urges, volatile enough under
any circumstances, are further complicated by the novelties and
tensions of intimate interracial association in halls and classrooms
and toilets. Philadelphians still recall grimly the incident at Shaw
Junior High School in 1956, when a Negro gang gathered outside the
school to insult and annoy pupils as they left the building. Three
teachers who came out to remonstrate were attacked and severely
beaten. The white principal of another Philadelphia school, who had
watched the deterioration of his school from an “honors” institution
of high scholarship into a second-rate vocational factory, was quoted
in _U. S. News_ in 1958: “Many of these youngsters are not adequately
motivated for learning. They have no home to speak of, nothing to
encourage them once they leave the school grounds. They’re here
simply to occupy their time until they’re old enough to go out and
get a job--if they can find a job.”
These are among the arguments of practicality the Southerner would
advance against compulsory desegregation of his public schools. He
is not prepared to chop logic, or to engage in casuistic debate on
the why of the world that he lives in. He knows that with the best
will in the world--and in his fashion, he more often than not has
great good will for the Negroes of his community--he cannot quickly
elevate the Negro’s home environment appreciably. Overnight he cannot
put books and magazines in Negro living rooms; he cannot inject
generations of cultural background with some magic hypodermic needle;
he cannot deliver to the Negro, as he would loan him a hoe or give
him an overcoat, the social graces, the community of experience, the
heritage of generations, the accumulation of business, professional,
and civic understanding that necessarily must figure in the educative
process. Time presses, and the school bell rings, and on April
mornings the honk of the school bus, like the voice of the turtle,
is abroad in the land. He has to do what he conceives to be best for
his child _now_, to prepare that child for the society he predictably
will live in tomorrow. And he does not accept the idea that racially
mixed classrooms, over a long period of years, in the context of
the only society he knows, will provide a workable, desirable, or
pleasant experience for sons and daughters who are dear to him.
Maybe, he says doubtfully, maybe some time in the future....
IX
If there ever is to be in the South any significant degree of
desegregation in public institutions, let alone any significant
degree of integration in society as a whole, it can come effectively
in one way only: slowly, cautiously, voluntarily, “some time in
the future.” This is the doctrine of “gradualism,” and the Negro’s
professional leaders despise it. They insist, with some plausibility,
that constitutional rights are personal and immediate rights, capable
of being lost irretrievably if they are not exercised at once; and
now that new constitutional rights have been created and defined,
they ask, why is the realization of these rights coming so slowly?
“How long do you expect us to wait?” they demand. “It is almost a
hundred years since slavery now.” They do not want to be gradual;
they want to be integrated.
To these impatient appeals, the South makes a number of responses,
none of them pleasing to the militant Negro leadership. But the
responses make sense nonetheless. The answers add up to this: The
Negro is plunging forward now in a movement that is at once both
revolutionary and evolutionary. All of man’s history suggests that
while revolutionary changes may be hurried and pushed along by
processes of forced growth, the changes that result from evolution
can never be hurried at all. They will come at their own speed, and
their own speed is glacial.
In many areas, the revolution proceeds apace. William G. Carleton,
of the University of Florida at Gainesville, acknowledges “great
strides” by the Southern Negro since World War II. In 1944, Negroes
were virtually barred from participation in Southern politics. In
1960, when he reported in the _Teachers’ College Record_ that Negro
rights were making haste slowly, 1,100,000 Negroes were registered
to vote in Southern primaries and general elections. The number is
considerably higher in 1962, and the United States Civil Rights
Commission has conceded that except in a relatively few Black Belt
localities in Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, Negroes
now are not prevented from registering or voting over most of the
South. In most areas, it is no longer the intimidation of the white
man, but far more often the indolence, indifference, and incapacity
of the Negro himself that keeps him from the polls. In some Southern
States, Negro registration has climbed to 35 or 40 per cent of the
adult Negro population; white registration, in many communities, is
seldom much more than half or two-thirds of the adult population. In
Florida, Negro registration increased from 8000 in 1944 to 160,000
in 1960. North Carolina and Virginia have witnessed gains almost
as notable. To Carleton, a “veritable revolution” is seen in the
South: “Had the mass of Southerners in 1950 been told that by 1960
there would be considerable token desegregation in the schools of
Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Texas; even more
desegregation on city bus lines; and that segregation at lunch
counters and eating places would be here and there giving way in the
South, they would have refused flatly to believe it. From the point
of view of social justice, the changes have been painfully slow
and spotty; but from the point of view of white Southern cultural
attitudes, the changes have been unbelievably swift.”
Note that the unbelievable changes of which Carleton speaks are
changes from “segregation” to “desegregation,” in his own careful
choice of nouns, and not changes from “segregation” to “integration.”
It takes no great powers of prophecy to envision a great many other
such changes, as the South cautiously explores the possibilities
of retaining its segregation while abandoning it too. I write in
a period of transition. Ten years hence, in 1972, the perfect
clarity of hindsight will perceive much that is now obscure; but my
impression is that some sort of peak has been reached by the white
South with the crisis over the parks of Birmingham. In the winter of
1961-62, a decision was reached by officials to close the Birmingham
parks rather than to accept a policy of permitting their joint use by
the two races, but the decision brought the first audible rumblings
of misgiving and disagreement in a city that previously had been
united in opposition to the slightest retreat from policies of total
municipal segregation. A great many persons in Birmingham, sincerely
convinced of the wisdom of essential racial separation, also were
sincerely convinced of the desirability of retaining the parks on
a functioning basis. They were aware that other Southern cities of
comparable urbanity and custom had adjusted to a system of open
parks. They did not like the idea of a parkless city; and they began
actively to think about all this.
To the devout believers in racial integration, it doubtless appears
incredible that Birmingham’s action could have been taken in the
first place, or that the wrongness of this decision (in their eyes)
should fail to be instantly apparent. These impatient critics simply
do not comprehend the depth of Southern feelings; they are as totally
unable to accept the viewpoint of the typical white Southerner as the
typical white Southerner is totally unable to accept the viewpoint
of the Negro. In the course of time, each of these conflicting
viewpoints will be seen more clearly; and once seen, may be
understood and dealt with. But the process demands time, time, and
more time. The death of racial segregation, which the integrationists
see as a necessary end, will follow Caesar’s prescription: It will
come when it will come.
To any objective observer, it should be manifest that such a time
is not yet--not in the early 1960s. In one city after another,
North as well as South, the plain and palpable fact is that where
“integration” is pushed too rapidly--more rapidly, that is, than the
Negro community is prepared to sustain it or the white community
is prepared to accept it--a reverse action has set in. The District
of Columbia offers a textbook example: Its public schools passed
in eight years from segregation to desegregation to a virtual
resegregation, as white families fled from mixed neighborhoods and
mixed schools. St. Louis has acknowledged the same experience:
William A. Kottmeyer, deputy superintendent of instruction in St.
Louis, told the National Conference of Editorial Writers in October
1961 that St. Louis then had more actual segregation in its schools
than had existed prior to the _Brown_ decision. Of 130 elementary
schools in St. Louis at the time, only 36 were classified as mixed;
46 were all white, and 48 all Negro. Nowhere in the South has school
desegregation been attempted under more favorable auspices than in
Louisville, yet in 1961-62 the trend back toward resegregation was
appearing there, too. Between 1950 and 1960, Baltimore experienced a
net out-migration of 175,000 white persons, and a net in-migration of
41,000 nonwhite persons. Dr. Houston R. Jackson, a Negro assistant
superintendent of Baltimore schools, said in the summer of 1961 that
Baltimore had more all-Negro schools at that time than it had before
desegregation began in the fall of 1954: “When the Negroes in a
school reach 50 per cent,” he added, “that’s when the white teachers
begin to ask for transfers.” And to judge from accounts of school
litigation in such Northern localities as New Rochelle, N. Y., and
Englewood, N. J., the antipathy of white persons to intimate and
personal relationships with Negro persons is not a wholly Southern
phenomenon. One satirical lexicographer, observing conditions in
Chicago, has defined integration as “the period which elapses between
the arrival of the first Negro and the departure of the last white.”
Manifestly, the resistance to a coerced racial “equality” is wide and
deep.
Why is this so? The answer, in blunt speech, is that the Negro
race, as a race, has not earned equality. And as I have attempted
to argue earlier, it is a feeble and evasive response to accuse the
white critic, in making that flat statement, of emulating the child
who shot his parents and then pleaded for mercy as an orphan. The
failure of the Negro race, as a race, to achieve equality cannot be
blamed wholly on white oppression. This is the excuse, the crutch,
the piteous and finally pathetic defense of Negrophiles unable or
unwilling to face reality. In other times and other places, sturdy,
creative, and self-reliant minorities have carved out their own
destiny; they have _compelled_ acceptance on their own merit; they
have demonstrated those qualities of leadership and resourcefulness
and disciplined ambition that in the end cannot ever be denied. But
the Negro race, as a race, has done none of this. “We do not _want_
to be second-class citizens,” cries James Farmer, national director
of the Congress for Racial Equality. But “wanting” is not enough. It
is a beginning; but it is no more than a beginning.
How is the Negro race, as a race, to earn the respect of the white
race as a race? I should imagine that a cultivation of self-respect
would offer an excellent starting place; and I do not see much of
this now. With a few notable exceptions, most Negro spokesmen appear
to spend their time condoning and minimizing the characteristics
that deprive their race of a “first-class” reputation. Are Negro
neighborhoods filthy? The Negro, it is said, has no incentive to
clean them up. Why does this appalling rate of illegitimacy persist?
The Negro, it is said, must relieve the frustrations brought on by
segregation. Are Negro incomes generally low? It is all the fault of
the white man: He deprives the Negro of job opportunities.
After so long a time, these repeated alibis grow stale. I have an
idea that some Negro defenders themselves have ceased to believe
in them. And I cherish the further idea that a really massive,
significant change in race relations will not come until the Negro
people develop leaders who will ask themselves the familiar question,
“Why are we treated as second-class citizens?” and return a candid
answer to it: “Because all too often that is what we are.”
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.”
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.”
Dr. Conant is a distinguished spokesman for liberalism, but unlike
most of his fastidious brethren, he came to the slums, and smelled
them, and began to see realities fair and clear. What he has to say
about Negro education merits a sober hearing. He is convinced that
it is wrong to insist upon a curriculum completely unsuited to the
needs of the children required to take it: “Foreign languages in
Grade 7 or algebra in Grade 8 ... have little place in a school in
which half the pupils in that grade read at the fourth-grade level
or below. Homework has little relevance in a situation where home is
a filthy, noisy tenement.” By the same token, it may be suggested
that in the rural South, school offerings ought to be adapted to real
life also; and though Dr. Conant is a staunch opponent of school
segregation as such--that is, to the assignment of pupils to schools
solely by reason of their race--he sees no reason why satisfactory
education cannot be provided in all Negro schools. Arbitrarily to
shift children around, simply to satisfy sociological theories of
an ideal race-mixture, impressed Dr. Conant as wrong. This approach
treats children “as though they were pawns on a chessboard.”
But these children, white and black, are not mere pawns on
a chessboard, and whatever the sins or submissions of their
great-grandfathers may have been, they merit consideration in their
own right. In the South, this consideration steadily is being
extended. If we of the South cannot turn the clock back to 1868,
when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, at least we can strive
to turn the clock back to 1896, when the doctrine of separate but
equal school facilities received a sort of casual endorsement from
a Supreme Court concerned primarily with a question of public
transportation. True, the apostles of the Brave New World will
denounce the idea of applying the constitutional principles of 1896
to problems of the early 1960s, but there have been entirely too many
such denunciations from thoughtless and ill-informed pedagogues.
The Negro (precisely as the white) is entitled, so far as a system
of education is concerned, to the same educational opportunities
afforded his white counterpart, and neither more nor less. What he
does with these educational opportunities thereafter is his question
to answer.
I do not profess to know what the future holds for the Southern
Negro, or for that matter, for the Northern Negro. The achievements
of the colored people of the 1950s merit at least provisional
applause: They are fighting their way out of millennial shadows--and
more power to them! If an arriving generation of Negro children can
sustain this momentum, the race should move ahead, first within
itself, as Dr. Conant pleads, and in time--_in time_--toward equality
with the larger and more established community around it. When
that hour of equality arrives--whenever that hour arrives--white
“prejudices” predictably will dissolve; there no longer would be a
basis for them. What comes thereafter I cannot suggest, but it is
reasonable to surmise that barriers once lowered will not thereafter
be raised capriciously again. When the Negro race proves itself, in
terms of Western values of maturity and achievement, it will be time
enough to talk of complete social and economic integration. Until
then, it is pointless to argue sociology; it is more useful, in every
way, to meditate upon the transcendent issues of the law.