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Footnotes 1371
progress—^the negro school, the saner negro church, the negro home—^the white com-
munity is in ignorance. Until it does know this aspect of our negro problem it may
know more or less accurately many things about the negro; but it cannot know the
negro. . . . Seeing the negro loafer on the street, the negro man or woman in domestic
service, the negro laborer in the fields, is not seeing the negro. . . . And at the point
where this lower contact ceases, at the point where the negro’s real efficiency begins,
and he passes out of domestic service or unskilled employment into a larger world, the
white community loses its personal and definite information; the negro passes into the
unknown. As the negro attains progress, he, by the very fact of progress, removes the
tangible evidence of progress from the immediate observation of the white community.
Thus the composite idea, the social conception of the negro which is beginning to obtain
among us, is determined more largely by the evidences of negro retrogression or negro
stagnation than by the evidence, the real and increasing evidence, of negro advance-
ment.” {Problems of the Present South [1909; first edition, 1904], pp. 167-168.)
Du Bols may be quoted to illustrate the Negro point of view:
“And here is a land where, in the higher walks of life, in all the higher striving for
the good and noble and true, the color-line comes to separate natural friends and
co-workers; while at the bottom of the social group in the saloon, the gambling-hall,
and the brothel, that same line wavers and disappears.” (W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls
of Black Folk [1903], p. 186.)
W. E. B. Du Bois gives the Negro angle to the situation when he writes of the
“best elements” of the two groups:
“. . . it is usually true that the very representatives of the two races, who for mutual
benefit and the welfare of the land ought to be in complete understanding and sym*
pathy, are so far strangers that one side thinks all whites are narrow and prejudiced,
and the other thinks educated Negroes dangerous and insolent. Moreover, in a land
where the tyranny of public opinion and the intolerance of criticism is for obvious
historical reasons so strong as in the South, such a situation is extremely difficult to
correct. The white man, as well as the Negro, is bound and barred by the color-line,
and many a scheme of friendliness and philanthropy, of broad-minded sympathy and
generous fellowship between the two has dropped still-born because some busybody has
forced the color-question to the front and brought the tremendous force of unwritten
law against the innovators.” {The Souls of Black Folk, p. 184.)
Moton, of. cit,, pp. 4-5,
^®The series of investigations on Negro youth recently prepared for the American
Youth Commission (see footnote 9 in this chapter) present a large amount of interview
material in which this view is confirmed.
Charles S. Johnson, whose study concerned the rural Deep South and who has most
explicitly analyzed his findings as to the attitudes of Negro youth toward the dominant
caste controls, concludes:
“Among the youth of all areas, social classes, and individual temperaments, two
characteristics were observed which were fairly common: (a) they were race conscious
to the extent of recognizing themselves as different and apart from the rest of the
community; and (b) they entertained a conviction that Negroes, as a race, were treated
unfairly and were suppressed economically.” {Growing Uf in the Black Belt [1941],
p. 285.)
The Southern caste order makes the expression of antagonism inadvisable and even
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