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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - VII. Social Inequality - 29. Patterns of Social Segregation and Discrimination - 2. Segregation and Discrimination in Interpersonal Relations
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6io An American Dilemma
by violation is a series of relations which involve at least one of the elements
associated with eating: satisfying physiological needs, sitting down together,
and engaging in sociable conversation. In public places, where there is a
chance that whites and Negroes will want to use the facilities at the same
time, there are separate rest rooms, toilets and drinking fountains all over
the South. The use of the same toilet and drinking fountain does occur
sometimes where it is not feasible to build separate facilities, as in some
gas stations, factories and households. This indicates that the taboo is not
quite so strong as in the case of eating and drinking. Separate rest rooms,
toilets, and drinking fountains are not maintained in the North.
Perhaps allied with the prohibition against the use of the same facilities
for the satisfaction of physiological needs is the prohibition against the
participation of Negroes in activities where the human body is used. Dancing
and swimming together are, as we have mentioned, especially taboo because
of their erotic associations, but the prohibition extends—in a greater or less
degree—to the various other sports and games.® The prohibition would seem
to be less effective where social relations are least necessary—^in group or
professional sports. Also the prohibition does not extend to children, who
often play together freely until puberty—a fact which shows the relation
of this phase of the etiquette to sex. Playing together of children is
reported to have been much more common in earlier times than now and
extended then into the upper classes. Now it is increasingly becoming a
lower class pattern both among whites and among Negroes. The Negro
upper class families want to spare their children from early interracial
experiences.^^ There is no general prohibition against Negroes taking part
in sports and games in the North, although individual whites often refuse
to play with Negroes. With the increase in sports and the greater prepara-
tion of Negroes for them, there has been an increase in interracial participa-
tion in them.
The conversation between whites and Negroes in the South is heavily
regimented by etiquette. In content the serious conversation should be about
• Sometimes the prohibition against mixed sports is extended to mixed equipment. Charles
S. Johnson {Patterns of Negro Segregation^ prepared for this study [1943]) p. 274) records
the case of a principal of a white high school refusing to accept a basketball belonging to
his school after the team of a Negro high school had borrowed it.
The principle of “not to be touched” extends in many directions. In a county in
Georgia, where the Negro schoolhouses were dilapidated, 1 observed that in two cases there
were good schoolhouses nearby which earlier had been used for white children but had
been left vacant as a result of the recent centralization of the white school system. Upon
my inquiry why they were not used for the Negro children, I was informed that this was
impossible, for these reasons: in the one case, that there was a nearby old white graveyard
and that white people in the community would not like to think of the barefoot Negro
children passing by the graves and perhaps even treading upon them, and, in the other case,
that the schoolhouse was used for occasional elections and that the white voters could not
possibly be asked to enter a house used as a Negro school for casting their votes.
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