Some people in Chicago, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, Columbus, O., and
other Northern cities are quietly trying to establish separate colored
schools. This is wrong, and should be resisted by black men and white.
Human contact, human acquaintanceship, human sympathy is the great
solvent of human problems. Separate school children by wealth and the
result is class misunderstanding and hatred. Separate them by race and
the result is war. Separate them by color and they grow up without
learning the tremendous truth that it is impossible to judge the mind
of a man by the color of his face. Is there any truth that America
needs to learn more? Back of this demand for the segregation of black
folk in public institutions, or the segregation of Italians, or the
segregation of any class, is almost always a shirking of responsibility
on the part of the public--a desire to put off on somebody else the
work of social uplift, while they themselves enjoy its results. Nobody
pretends to deny that probably three-fourths of the colored children in
the public schools of a great Northern city are below the average of
their fellow students in some respects. They are, however, capable of
improvement, and of rapid improvement. This improvement can be carried
on by the community. The community can, however, if it is cowardly and
selfish, shirk this responsibility and pile it on the shoulders of the
Negroes represented by the one-fourth of Negro children who are above
the average, or equal to it; and they can, if they are persistent,
succeed in pushing back and possibly overwhelming a deserving and
rising class of colored people.
This is the history of color discrimination in general in Philadelphia,
New York and Chicago. When the discrimination comes in various lines
of life, it does not bear simply on those who are not hurt by it--who
do not feel it, and who by their position naturally fall outside the
lines of discrimination, but it comes with crushing weight upon those
other Negroes to whom the reasons for discrimination do not apply in
the slightest respect, and they are thus made to bear a double burden.
Further than this, when the discrimination is once established,
immediately the public provisions for the segregated portion become
worse. If it is discrimination against poor people, then the schools
for the poor people become worse than those for the rich--less well
equipped and less well supervised. If it is discrimination against
colored people, the colored school becomes poor, with less money and
less means of efficiency.
The argument, then, for color discrimination in schools and in public
institutions is an argument against democracy and an attempt to shift
public responsibility from the shoulders of the public to the shoulders
of some class who are unable to defend themselves.