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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - I. The Approach - 3. Facets of the Negro Problem - 6. The Manifoldness and the Unity of the Negro Problem
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74 An American Dilemma
shows that in our attempt to analyze the Negro problem we have not been
able to avoid anything: race, culture, population, breadwinning, economic
and social policy, law, crime, class, family, recreation, school, church, press,
organizations, politics, attitudes.
The perplexities and manifoldness of the Negro problem have even
increased considerably during the last generation. One reason is migration
and industrialization. The Negro has left his seclusion. A much smaller
portion of the Negro people of today lives in the static, rather inarticulate
folk society of the old plantation economy. The Negro people have increas-
ingly stepped into the midst of Americans high-geared metropolitan life,
and they have by their coming added to the complication of these already
tremendously complicated communities. This mass movement of Negroes
from farms to cities and from the South to the North has, contrary to
expectation, kept up in bad times as in good, and is likely to continue.
Another and equally important reason why the Negro problem shows
an increasing involvement with all sorts of other special problems is the
fact that America, especially during the last ten years, has started to use
the state as an instrument for induced social change. The New Deal has
actually changed the whole configuration of the Negro problem. Particu-
larly when looked upon from the practical and political viewpoints, the
contrast between the present situation and the one prior to the New Deal
is striking.
Until then the practical Negro problem involved civil rights, education,
charity, and little more. Now it has widened, in pace with public policy in
the new ^^welfare state,” and involves housing, nutrition, medicine, educa-
tion, relief and social security, wages and hours, working conditions, child
and woman labor, and, lately, the armed forces and the war industries.
The Negro’s share may be meager in all this new state activity, but he
has been given a share. He has been given a broader and more variegated
front to defend and from which to push forward. This is the great import
of the New Deal to the Negro. For almost the first time in the history of
the nation the state has done something substantial in a social way without
excluding the Negro.
In this situation it has sometimes appeared as if there were no longer a
Negro problem distinct from all the other social problems in the United
States. In popular periodicals, articles on the general Negro problem gave
way to much more specific subjects during the ’thirties. Even on the
theoretical level it has occurred to many that it was time to stop studying
the Negro problem in itself. The younger generation of Negro intellectuals
have become tired of all the talk about the Negro problem on which they
were brought up, and which sometimes seemed to them so barren of real
deliveries. They started to criticize the older generation of Negroes for
their obsession with the Negro problem. In many ways this was a move-
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