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CHAPTER l6
INCOME, CONSUMPTION AND HOUSING*
I. Family Income
In a general way we know why the Negro Is poor. As a farmer, he has
been kept in a dependent position and has been exploited. He was tied to
cotton agriculture where the risks were such that at one time it brought sud-
den riches to white people but now forces surplus workers, particularly
Negroes, to leave the Southern land. As a city worker, he has been kept
out of jobs, especially the good ones. He has seldom been allowed to prepare
himself adequately for jobs requiring high skill or professional training.
Because of residential segregation, he is confined to slums to an even greater
extent than his low purchasing power makes necessary. He does not share
equally with his white fellow citizen in the free services given by the
government.
Now, let us ask: What is the result of all this? Just how poor is the
Negro? What is his annual income? Does he get a sufficient diet? In what
kind of house does he live? How docs his level of living, in terms of actual
consumption, compare with that of the whites?
The typical Southern Negro farm family has an income of but a few
hundred dollars a year. It is considerably lower than that -of the average
white farm family. This is due, in part, to the fact that Negroes are more
concentrated at the bottom of the ^‘agricultural ladder” than are whites.
This is not the whole explanation, however, for the income of the average
Negro family at any given tenure status^ is always much lower than is the
income of the average white family. Negro farm families of higher than
sharecropper status are not any better off, on the average, than are white
sharecroppers.^
Extremely low, also, are the incomes of most Negro families in the
villages of the South. The Consumer Purchases Study indicates that half
the “normal”** Negro families in 34 Southern villages—^located in Georgia,
Mississippi, and the Carolinas—had incomes under $330 in 1935-1936.
• This chapter is based principally on Richard Sterner and Associates, The Negro’s Share
(1943). This book was prepared for our study.
**
A “normal” family coxisists of at least husband and wife, living together, with or
without children.
364
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