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Footnotes 1185
by some outstanding writers in American literature. See, for example, William James’
two essays: “The Will to Believe” in The New World: A Quarterly Review of Religion^
Ethics^ and Theology (June, 1896), pp. 327-347, and “On a Certain Blindness in
Human Beings” in On Some of Lifers Ideals (1912), pp. 3-46.
The Souls of Black Folk (1924; first edition, 1903), p. 186.
The Story of the Negro
^
Vol. i (1909), p. 180.
The Autobiografhy of an Ex-Coloured Many p. 166. Johnson goes on to draw too
optimistic conclusions from this statement when he continues:
“. . . and a mental attitude, especially one not based on truth, can be changed more
easily than actual conditions. That is to say, the burden of the question is not that the
whites are struggling to save ten million despondent and moribund people from sinking
into a hopeless slough of ignorance, poverty, and barbarity in their very midst, but that
they are unwilling to open certain doors of opportunity and to accord certain treatment
to ten million aspiring, education-and-property-acquiring people. In a word, the dif-
ficulty of the problem is not so much due to the facts presented as to the hypothesis
assumed for its solution.” {idem,)
He overlooks here that the “actual conditions” of the Negroes actually fortify “a mental
attitude” on the part of the whites to form a vicious circle, which will constitute the
main viewpoint in this book (see Chapter 3, Section 7).
James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way (1934), p. 318.
Of, Cit,y p. 65.
Race Orthodoxy in the South (1914), pp. 37 and 347.
What the Negro Thinks (1929), p. 65.
Negro Americansy What Now? (1934), p. lOl.
Along This Way, p. 142.
Americans Tragedy (1934), p. 72.
The New York Times (May 26, 1942), p. 20.
Murphy, of, cit,, p. 23.
American Minority Peofles (1932), pp. 205-206. The author, thereafter, describes
the subsequent disfranchisement, condones the Southern election laws—without any
explicit value premises—criticizes the white primary and generally the unfair adminis-
tration of the laws, leaving the reader, however, with the impression that measures to
enforce the Constitution and the state laws are out of the discussion. There is no other
interpretation than that such interferences would mean making the Negro “a ward of
the nation.”
Chapter 3. Facets of the Negro Problem
^
More recently, Donald R. Young has been most outstanding in arguing this restate-
ment of the Negro problem. We quote from him:
“The view here presented is that the problems and principles of race relations are
remarkably similar, regardless of what groups are involved; and that only by an integrated
study of all minority peoples in the United States can a real understanding and soci-
ological analysis of the involved social phenomena be achieved.” (American Minority
Peofles [1932], pp. xiii-l.)
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