By Jesse O. Thomas
The social and economic situations and different experiences in human relationship suggest or create different terms or phraseology. Some of them grow out of scientific analysis; others of them come down to us through age-old traditions. If one took the time to scientifically inquire into the basis or justification of many of our modes of expression with reference to specific situations, we would doubtless discover that many of our over-worked, mouth-filling terms or phraseology would be misnomeous. (misnomers?)
Take the expression, “Negro problem.” I am not sure that there is a Negro problem. I doubt seriously if there is anybody in this country who is able to state with any degree of undisputed authenticity that there is or that there is not a Negro problem. That is to say, there may be somewhere along the lines of our human progress some conditions that are peculiarly racial that are shot through with racial instincts, impulses and idiosyncrasies. This may be true of all racial groups in a corresponding degree. But what American has learned to regard as a “Negro problem” I doubt seriously if there is anybody in this country who is able to state with any degree of undisputed authenticity that there is or that there is not a Negro problem. That is to say, there may be somewhere along the lines of our human progress some conditions that are peculiarly racial that are shot through with racial instincts, impulses and idiosyncrasies. This may be true of all racial groups in a corresponding degree. But what America has learned to regard as a “Negro problem” has little or no racial significance.
The fact that the Negro death rate is almost twice as high as the death rate of white people living in the same communities is referred to as a “Negro problem.” The lack of paved streets and adequate lights, water supply, sewerage disposal facilities or what not become, again, a “Negro problem.” When large numbers of foreigners are brought together in any American community who are without education and unable to speak the English language, they do not produce or create German, Irish, Italian, Polack, French, Jew, Russian, Green or whatnot problems. They simply make necessary a problem of Americanization, or education. The congested and overcrowded housing conditions and other evidences of lack of economic efficiency do not produce race or racial problems, simply problems in economic or social adjustment. And if any group, whether in America or elsewhere, becomes so impoverished that charitable aid is necessary because of starvation or hardship or otherwise, they are not racial problems of the group involved.
When the American white man is ignorant and economically inefficient, he does not produce a white race problem, but a problem in social and economic adjustment.
In the city of Atlanta, out of the 14,000 Negro children who are enrolled in our public schools, less than 2,000 of them are on full time schedule. None of the Negro children are attending high schools provided for by public school funds of the city of Atlanta, as is true in many other cities throughout the south. This is not a “Negro problem.” It is simply a failure in the educational system to provide adequate educational facilities for Negro children, and in the last analysis a problem in education.
Negroes live in worse houses, more unsanitary and more hazardous to health and well being than the white people, taking it in mass by and large. But here again, this is not a race problem—a problem in economics.
Because of the lack of education, lack of training, the lack of opportunity, the double economic standard together with racial prejudice, the average Negro’s earning capacity is very much lower than the average white man’s earning capacity. But this is not a “Negro problem.” It is a problem of enfranchisement or the result of disenfranchisement, a matter of denying a group the right guaranteed them by the Constitution.
What I would seriously like to see in the Negro given the same advantages and opportunities, the same opportunity for training and development, a chance to earn and spend his money in a manner that will mean the highest possible development to himself and family, unrestricted, unmolested and undisturbed, and a chance to move about to serve and spend himself and his energies to the advancement of human progress without interference in so far as he remains in harmony with the law governing other individuals; the same chance for education, the same chance for economic development; the same guarantee for protection of life and limb and then see whether there still remains a problem peculiar to his racial group.
In other words, let’s take out the educational, economic, social and political problems and see if there still remains that which may be called a “Negro problem.”
From the front page of The Star of Zion, Charlotte, N.C., March 1, 1923
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