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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - XI. An American Dilemma - 45. America Again at the Crossroads in the Negro Problem - 2. Social Trends
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Chapter 45. America Again at the Crossroads lOOl
in the South, but It definitely decreased It. It also brought a new kind of
public servant to the South, educated and zealous officials who were not
primarily interested in ^^keeping the Negro in his place” but in encouraging
and advancing him. This Introduced a new and wholesome type of public
contact for the Negro people in the South, and Negroes got a feeling that
public authority could be other than arbitrary and suppressive.
In the North public services were, on the whole, granted to Negroes as
to other citizens in similar circumstances.
While in all these spheres the trends at the outbreak of the present War
were definitely in the direction of a rise In the status of the Negro in
America,® the same cannot be said about those relating to his occupational
status. In Southern agriculture the Negro’s plight had been becoming
continually worse and showed no prospects for a brighter future. His low
place on the occupational ladder usually as a plantation tenant—the increase
of Negro landownership had stopped 40 years earlier—his dependence on
cotton, his lack of education, and the intense race prejudice in the blighted
rural regions of the South made him the main sufferer of the boll weevil,
of Southern over-population and ^Vhite infiltration,” of mechanization and,
during the ’thirties, of the collapsing world market and the contractionist
national agricultural policy. Yet there were no wholehearted attempts on
a mass scale, either by the federal government or by any other agency, to
reeducate rural Southern Negroes to take up new occupations in other
areas. America was under the spell of economic defeatism so far as a belief
in continued rapid industrialization was concerned, and there was no hope
of placing the dislocated Negro sharecropper in the industrial cities.
Some rural Negroes moved to Northern and Southern cities, increasing
unemployment there. Monopoly of jobs by the whites increased during the
Great Depression, and Negroes did not find any new employment openings.
Various national policies, such as the Wages and Hours Law, instituted to
stamp out sweatshop conditions, could not avoid hurting the employment
opportunities of Negroes since they were marginal workers. Under these
conditions it is a wonder that Negroes were able to retain as many of their
jobs as they did. But Negro unemployment mounted in all cities, particu-
larly in the North, and the Negro workers increasingly became a relief
burden. The whole country, and particularly the North, was much more
generous toward the Negro in doling out relief to him than in allowing
him to work and earn his bread by his own labor.
Meanwhile, the new unions in the mass production industries gave Negro
workers hope by organizing them together with whites in fields in which
• Coming back to South Carolina after an absence of twenty years, John Andrew Rice
noted as one of the outstanding changes: “The Southerner’s attitude toward the Negro is
incredibly more humane than it was in the South I knew as a child.” (/ Came Out of the
Eighteenth Century [1942], p. 195.)
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