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Chapter 30. Effects of Social Inequality 645
are rising. They are rising most rapidly in the North, but their rate of rise
in the South is not inconsiderable. It is one of the paradoxes of the Amer-
ican situation, ultimately due to the split morality of the nation on the
issue of racial democracy, that this rise of the Negroes to a great extent is
the result of education and other public efforts, which—solicited by the
Negro leaders, pushed by a small minority of Southern liberals, and
assisted by Northern philanthropy—is largely provided by the Southern
states themselves with the approval of the ordinary Southern whites in
political power, acting in partial obedience to the American Creed.
The fundamental character of these efforts and their result have been
to diffuse American middle class norms to the uneducated and crude
Southern “folk Negroes,” emerging out of the backwardness of slavery.
Besides education, the persistent forces of industrialization and urbanization
are having an impact on the Negro. Migration, occupational changes, the
easy methods of communication, the Negro press, the growth of Negro
organizations, the radio, the moving pictures, and all other vehicles of
“modern life” are working upon the minds of Southern Negroes, gradually
upsetting the older static tradition of compliance and introducing new
thoughts and presumptions, dissatisfaction and unrest. In so far as the caste
line remains comparatively fixed, one result of these changes is increasing
isolation. The spiritual effects of segregation are accumulating with each
new generation, continuously estranging the two groups.
One phase of the rise of the Negroes is the formation of a Negro middle
and upper class.** A nucleus of such a class was already forming among free
Negroes in slavery times. Since then it has been steadily, but slowly, grow-
ing, partly as a result of segregation itself, which holds down the Negro
masses but opens petty monopolies for a few. These middle and upper
class Negroes, who have stepped out of the servant status, live mostly by
catering to their own people.** Not only have their economic contacts with
whites been reduced but, because they know they are not liked by whites
and are likely to feel humiliated in all contacts with them, they avoid
whites in all other spheres of life. They even avoid, as we have had
occasion to mention, the segregated set-ups where contact with whites is
formalized and kept to a minimum.
It is the present writer’s impression that, generally speaking, this tiny
upper group of the Negro community often lives in a seclusion from white
society which is simply extraordinary and seldom realized by white people.
Measured in terms of the number of personal contacts with white people,
there are Negro doctors, dentists, teachers, preachers, morticians, and
druggists in the South who might as well be living in a foreign country:
“. . . as the progressive colored people advance, they constantly widen the
* See Chapter 32.
**
See Chapter 14.
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