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The Future of the American Negro

Read using. Title: The Future of the American Negro. Author: Booker T. For more information, click here. Synopsis From , the most influential black man in America was Booker T. Washington, who less than 35 years earlier had been born into slavery. The young boy worked laboriously until emancipation before going on to seek an education. With his position of power, Washington spoke out against Jim Crow laws and Southern disfranchisement of blacks. Du Bois, who wanted to protest more vehemently in an effort to secure civil rights. Washington believed confrontation would only hurt the cause, and that cooperation and softer tones would wear down racism over time.

To that end, both men wrote voluminously in support of their stances and thoughts. Washington wrote 14 books, including his renowned autobiography, Up From Slavery , which was published in In all history slavery has usually been succeeded by a period of semi-slavery or serfdom. Just how far this is necessary, and how far it is the result of imperfect emancipation, it is difficult to determine.

There was a disposition in the United States, for a few years following the Civil War, to insure the complete emancipation of the negro slave. This was a tremendously difficult undertaking, but not necessarily impossible.

The nation, however, quickly tired of the task, and the present state of serfdom ensued. And I call it serfdom without apology, because serfdom it is. Throughout the United States the mass of the negro population is curtailed in personal liberty, is insecure in life and property, has peculiar difficulty in earning a decent living, has almost no voice in his own government, does not enjoy adequate educational facilities, and suffers, no matter what its ability or desert, discount, impertinence and contempt, by reason of race and colour.

To be more specific, it is clear that negroes are usually unable to enjoy fully the ordinary rights of domicile or of travel, the use of public conveniences, and of many facilities for instruction and entertainment. The black man is in continual danger of mob violence in New York as in New Orleans, in the West as in the South; his economic condition is especially unfortunate; he was emancipated suddenly, without land, capital, or tools, or skill, and generously bidden to go to work, be sober, and save money.

He did go to work, he did work faithfully, and he did save some money.

The future of the American Negro

And yet his most frantic efforts, under the circumstances, could not save him from sinking into an economic serfdom which, at its best, is organised and systematic pauperism. To turn astray in modern competitive industry a mass of ignorant, unguided working-men, whose employers despise them, and for whom the rest of the nation evinces only spasmodic concern, is to invite oppression.

The result is oppression. In the cities of the South and in the North the colour line is so drawn as to increase competition against the negro, restrict his chances of employment, and lower his labour price, and while agencies for his degradation welcome and invite him, those for his uplifting are closed or coldly tolerant.

In a day when political power is, for weal or woe, so intimately bound up with economic success and efficiency, the negro is being systematically and quickly disfranchised. Taxation without representation is the rule of his life. In the South he is taxed for libraries which he may not use, for public high schools and colleges which he may not attend, and for public parks where he cannot sit.

The fear of political consequences or of labour strikes never deters an employer from discharging his negro hands or reducing their wages, while that same fear may keep out negro labourers or lead to the substitution of whites even at an economic disadvantage. In regard to the present educational facilities of the land only one negro child in three receives regular instruction, and that for only a few months in the year, under teachers often poorly equipped and sometimes not equipped at all.

It is fair to say that less than 20 per cent. There are a number of poorly furnished high schools for training teachers, and a few institutions doing college work. The only branch of education that to-day can command large and ungrudging support is manual and industrial training, the importance of which, great as it certainly is, is being obviously exaggerated and unduly emphasised at present. If those at the higher schools for negroes' training should turn their class-rooms into blacksmiths' shops and make wagons instead of making men, they would get far more enthusiastic support.

They simply maintain that there is a place in the world for training men as such, and when the public ceases to agree with them they must close their doors. In this plain statement I am not seeking to minimise the vast efforts put forth for negro education in the United States; I am simply pointing out that, great as those efforts have been, they are strikingly inadequate, and that under present conditions the majority of negro children are growing up in ignorance, and without the proper moral and intellectual leadership of adequately trained teachers, ministers, and heads of families.

And finally the whole social atmosphere in which the negro lives and works, the intangible and powerful spiritual environment of the race, is such as to foster more and more either a false humility or hypocrisy, or an unreasoning radicalism and despair. This is a condition of serfdom. Its symptoms vary, of course, in time and place; localities might easily be found where certain phases of the condition are better than I have indicated, and others where they are worse.

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The picture I have painted is perhaps an average one. Now, I have said that the first possible future of the American negro is the perpetuation and perfection of this present serfdom. This would involve the strengthening of present prescriptive laws, the further disfranchisement of black men, and the legal recognition of customary caste distinctions. This has been the distinct tendency of the South in the last decade, and this programme has gained respectful hearing and acquiescence in influential parts of the North.

The question then is: What does such a policy involve so far as the negro is concerned? If along with the repression and proscription there could be expected cheerful acquiescence in inferiority and faithful work, then this solution would have much in its favour. It is, however, difficult to see how under the long continuance of the present system anything but degeneration into hopelessness, immorality, and crime could ensue. Under modern conditions of life and social and economic organisation, a permanent and successful caste system is impossible.

The essence of modern democracy is the placing in the hand of the individual the power and responsibility for maintaining his right and liberty; and even in the larger social democracy which we see in the future the corner-stone must be that no social group is to be placed at the mercy of, or in entire dependence upon, the sense of justice of another group.


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To-day and to-morrow the reduction of a mass of men to permanent or long-continued economic and political inferiority means the deliberate reduction of their chances of survival, and the deliberate encouragement of degeneration among them. In any social group, however prosperous, degenerative tendencies may always be disclosed. The situation becomes critical and fatal when such tendencies are more manifest than those of upbuilding and progress. Among American negroes the tendencies to degeneration, while not yet in the ascendency, have undoubtedly been encouraged and fostered by the history of the last two decades.

Now a careful consideration of these defects will clearly show that they are the children, and the legitimate children, of a caste system.

What is it that slavery and serfdom have been most assiduous in teaching the negro if it be not timidity, lack of a sense of personal worth, and inability to bear responsibility, and must not such teaching eventually engender carelessness and lack of courtesy?

These men must be ever hesitant as to their rights and duties; in the face of continued disappointment their courage must waver; it is hard to maintain one's self-respect when all the world, even to the urchins on the street, regard you with evident contempt; and self-reliance and persistency must be fed by reasonable hope of success if it is to become characteristic of a people.

On the other hand, those qualities of character which, by four hundred years of persistent artificial selection, have been partially educated out of the negro are the very qualities upon which the civilised world is putting an exaggerated emphasis to-day. A people without pluck that borders on brazenness and courage akin to brutality is ruthlessly thrust aside, euphoniously designated as "lesser breeds without the law," and is robbed, routed, and raped by every civilised agency from the battleship to the Christian Church.

From such considerations it seems inevitable that the present policy of the nation toward the negro must eventually result in increasing hopelessness, immorality, and crime. Indeed, it is one of the most curious developments of the present to witness the widespread and touching surprise of the people in the United States at the spread of crime among negroes.

Men shake their heads and say, "How surprising! And such a docile and sweet-tempered race! The negro criminal has appeared, and negro crime is spreading. Is this phenomenon a new and peculiar race characteristic, or simply the logical effect of known causes? There seems to be a fatuous and curious notion among some Americans that such a consummation is devoutly to be wished; they discover with evident glee any indication that a wholesale process of degeneration has finally mastered the negro. If men fear with a mighty fear an epidemic of small-pox, or are urged to extraordinary exertions to stamp out yellow fever, can they look with equanimity and lack-lustre eye upon the infection of nine million neighbours with a far more deadly virus?

Can anyone but a fool think it is to his interest to make every eighth man in his country a pauper and a criminal, in addition to the growing load of his own degenerates? Not even a rich and healthy land like America could, without imminent and lasting peril, stand the moral and physical shock, the frightful contagion which must accompany the slow degradation and social murder of ten million human souls.

The second possible future of the American negro arises from the possibility hinted at that the negro is not destined to remain long in this land. It is the expectation of many Americans, and Americans too of honesty and integrity, that gradually but inevitably the negro will die out before degeneration sets in to such an extent as to make him a menace to the land.

These are the portion of Americans who cannot conceive how the negro can ever become an integral part of this republic; for the sake of the land, therefore, and the interests of the many, and from no especial dislike or prejudice against the negro, they hope that the race will either die out or migrate from the land.

The Future of the American Negro

This is the practical and unemotional way in which the Darwinian doctrine of survival is applied in America to the negro problem. And I presume it is fair to say that a very large proportion, if not the majority, of the thinking people of America have adopted this attitude.

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The question of race and survival which is thus touched upon is of so deep a significance to-day, when European civilisation is coming in contact with nearly all the world's great races, that it is of the utmost importance that sane and correct ideas on the subject should be current among the mass of citizens. To-day this is not the case. On the contrary, there is unfortunately widespread ignorance of the doctrines of race survival and human efficiency current even among people who ought to think more clearly.

And this ignorance is helped on by the marvellous [ sic ] ignorance of human history permissible among people called intelligent, among Jingo writers, and the readers of Kipling's doggerel.

The Future of the American Negro - Wikipedia

In such way we have come to a more or less clearly conceived public opinion which considers the present civilisation of Europe and America as by far the greatest the world has seen; which gives the credit of this culture to the white germanic peoples, and considers that these races have a divine right to rule the world in such way as they think best. This, I take it, is the creed of most Englishmen and Americans to-day. That such a creed is dangerous and needs the most careful scrutiny and revision is clear from the extraordinary deeds that have been committed under its guidance.

The red-handed crimes that to-day may be laid at the door of men who have honestly and sincerely sought to work in accordance with this scheme of survival are enough to cause heart-searching among decent people, not to mention Christians and Christian Churches. I need cite here but a single case. There lies to the westward of America, in the summer seas, a cluster of islands bursting with beauty and fragrance, with men and women and children neither better nor worse than the average of primitive folk.