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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Footnotes - Chapter 9 - Chapter 10
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Footnotes 1233
“Sir,—There is a sort of soft-soap piety floating around in our part of the world that
is like the will-o-the-wisp that rises from miasmic swampland. It floats majestically over
the ‘Negro question/ but when analyzed there is nothing to it. The special point about
which it is bobbing now is ‘equalization of teachers’ salaries.’ Let’s cast the light of reality
(or, should 1 say, the sunlight of truth?) over the shadowed point and present it as
many of us vitally interested really see it.
“Should Negro teachers receive the same salary that white teachers receive? Emphati-
cally, No! Why not?
“(i) Less than 10 per cent, of our taxes is paid by Negroes. Of course, destitute
white children attend the same schools that wealthy ones attend, but they are of the same
race, an identical social unit, with co-ordinating future obligations.
“(2) Negroes do not teach the same type of future citizens that white teachers
instruct. God made the two races different and exacts of them their own best contribu-
tions. White people have and will continue to have responsibility ‘the brothers in black’
cannot assume.
“(3) Negroes do not teach the same things in reality and in the same way that white
instructors do. The average Negro has an honorable service to render outside the academic
field.
“(4) White people owe Negroes no especial debt, save to ‘love one another’ in a
Christian way. The Negro race has gained far more from the civic contact with the white
than can be here portrayed—and Negro people generally know this and appreciate it,
the ‘soft-soap piety’ generally bubbling from the Caucasian mouth . . . Why do these
people bubble and babble? Perhaps because it is a psychological truth that everyone wants
to make a ‘splash’ in life’s ‘mud-puddle!’
“(5) If Negro people are paid the same salaries the white teachers receive, salaries
will not be equalized, but Negro teachers will have more, as their living expenses are less.
This economic fact should have weight. Compare rent lists in good sections for white
and Negro, for instance.
“Let’s not ‘fly in the face of God’ and His great plan. While He made all men of
one blood, He gave them gifts differing. Let not the white girl’s salary for service In
the schoolroom be lessened, as it has already been markedly in a few cases, for her
financial responsibilities, as well as her pedagogical efforts, must be greater than her
Negro sister’s. And above all, don’t confuse piety with bubbles!
Montrose.” ^
®
“A Salary Study for the Lexington Public Schools,” of, cit,y p. 25. See Chapter 14,
Section 4.
Chapter 10. The Tradition of Slavery
^ Rupert B. Vance, Human Geografhy of the South (1932), p. 467.
2 Ibid.^ p. 474.
^ Ibid.y p. 467.
^ John Dollard, Caste and Class in a Southern Tozvn (i937)> p* 55*
® W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (1935), p. 13.
•“The News Leader Forum,” Richmond Hevis Leader (December 6, i94i)«
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