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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 3. Facets of the Negro Problem - 4. The “Rank Order of Discriminations”
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Chapter’ 3« Facets of the Negro Problem 65
difficult for him to give his approval to the second rank of discrimination,
namely, that involving ^^etiquette” and consisting in the white man’s
refusal to extend the ordinary courtesies to Negroes in daily life and his
expectation of receiving certain symbolic signs of submissivcncss from the
Negro. The Negro leader could not do so without serious risk of censor-
ship by his own people and rebuke by the Negro press. In all articulate
groups of Negroes there is a demand to have white men call them by their
titles of Mr., Mrs., and Miss; to have white men take off their hats on
entering a Negro’s house; to be able to enter a white man’s house through
the front door rather than the back door, and so on. But on the whole, and
in spite of the rule that they stand up for “social equality” in this sense,
most Negroes in the South obey the white man’s rules.
Booker T. Washington went a long way, it is true, in his Atlanta speech
in 1895 where he explained that: “In all things that are purely social we
[the two races] can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all
things essential to mutual progrcss.”“^ He there seemed to condone not
only these rules of “etiquette” but also the denial of “social equality” in
a broader sense, including some of the further categories in the white man’s
rank order of discrimination. He himself was always most eager to observe
the rules. But Washington was bitterly rebuked for this capitulation,
particularly by Negroes in the North. And a long time has passed since
then; the whole spirit in the Negro world has changed considerably in
three decades.
The modern Negro leader will try to solve this dilemma by Iterating
that no Negroes want to intrude upon white people’s private lives. But
this is not what Southern white opinion asks for. It is not satisfied with
the natural rules of polite conduct that no individual, of whatever race,
shall push his presence on a society where he is not wanted. It asks for a
general order according to w^hich all Negroes arc placed under all white
people and excluded from not only the white man’s society but also from
the ordinary symbols of respect. No Negro shall ever aspire to them, and
no white shall be allowed to offer them.
Thus, on this second rank of discrimination there is a wide gap between
the ideologies of the two groups. As we then continue downward in our
rank order and arrive at the ordinary Jim Crow practices, the segregation
in schools, the disfranchisement, and the discrimination in employment, we
find, on the one hand, that increasingly larger groups of white people arc
prepared to take a stand against these discriminations. Many a liberal white
professor in the South who, for his own welfare, would not dare to entertain
a Negro in his home and perhaps not even speak to him in a friendly man-
ner on the street, will be found prepared publicly to condemn disfranchise-
ment, lynching, and the forcing of the Negro out of employment. Also,
on the other hand, Negro spokesmen are becoming increasingly firm in
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