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All this segregation by color is largely independent of that
natural clustering by social grades common to all communities.
A Negro slum may be in dangerous proximity to a white
residence quarter, while it is quite common to find a white
slum planted in the heart of a respectable Negro district. One
thing, however, seldom occurs: the best of the whites and the
best of the Negroes almost never live in anything like close
proximity. It thus happens that in nearly every Southern town
and city, both whites and blacks see commonly the worst of
each other. This is a vast change from the situation in the
past, when, through the close contact of master and house-servant
in the patriarchal big house, one found the best of both
races in close contact and sympathy, while at the same time
the squalor and dull round of toil among the field-hands was
removed from the sight and hearing of the family. One can
easily see how a person who saw slavery thus from his
father's parlors, and sees freedom on the streets of a great
city, fails to grasp or comprehend the whole of the new
picture. On the other hand, the settled belief of the mass of
the Negroes that the Southern white people do not have the
black man's best interests at heart has been intensified in later
years by this continual daily contact of the better class of
blacks with the worst representatives of the white race.
Coming now to the economic relations of the races, we are
on ground made familiar by study, much discussion, and no
little philanthropic effort. And yet with all this there are many
essential elements in the cooperation of Negroes and whites
for work and wealth that are too readily overlooked or not
thoroughly understood. The average American can easily conceive
of a rich land awaiting development and filled with
black laborers. To him the Southern problem is simply that of
making efficient workingmen out of this material, by giving
them the requisite technical skill and the help of invested
capital. The problem, however, is by no means as simple as
this, from the obvious fact that these workingmen have been
trained for centuries as slaves. They exhibit, therefore, all the
advantages and defects of such training; they are willing and
good-natured, but not self-reliant, provident, or careful. If
now the economic development of the South is to be pushed
to the verge of exploitation, as seems probable, then we have
a mass of workingmen thrown into relentless competition
with the workingmen of the world, but handicapped by a
training the very opposite to that of the modern self-reliant
democratic laborer. What the black laborer needs is careful
personal guidance, group leadership of men with hearts in
their bosoms, to train them to foresight, carefulness, and
honesty. Nor does it require any fine-spun theories of racial
differences to prove the necessity of such group training after
the brains of the race have been knocked out by two hundred
and fifty years of assiduous education in submission, carelessness,
and stealing. After Emancipation, it was the plain
duty of some one to assume this group leadership and training
of the Negro laborer. I will not stop here to inquire whose
duty it was--whether that of the white ex-master who had
profited by unpaid toil, or the Northern philanthropist whose
persistence brought on the crisis, or the National Government
whose edict freed the bondmen; I will not stop to ask whose
duty it was, but I insist it was the duty of some one to see that
these workingmen were not left alone and unguided, without
capital, without land, without skill, without economic organization,
without even the bald protection of law, order, and
decency,--left in a great land, not to settle down to slow and
careful internal development, but destined to be thrown almost
immediately into relentless and sharp competition with
the best of modern workingmen under an economic system
where every participant is fighting for himself, and too often
utterly regardless of the rights or welfare of his neighbor.
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