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(1944) [MARC] Author: Gunnar Myrdal
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Footnotes 1353
“No smaU part of the motive back of the South’s legal separation of the races in
transportation and education is the fact that services for the two races can be made
unequal only when administered to them separately. The phrase ‘separate and equal’
symbolizes the whole system, fair words to gain unfair ends.” (Arthur Raper, “Race
and Class Pressures,” unpublished manuscript prepared for this study [1940], p. 3.)
Henry W. Grady, The New South (1890), pp. 244-246; italics ours. In this con-
text Grady furnishes his audience the following illustrative information:
“The Negroes of Georgia pay but one-fortieth of the taxes, and yet they take forty-
nine per cent of the school fund. Railroads in Georgia provide separate but equal cars
for whites and blacks, and a white man is not permitted to occupy a colored car.” {Ibid,^
p- 246.)
This information is, of course, inaccurate even today and was still more so in
Grady’s time.
Referring to the Jim Crow arrangement in the railway system, William Archer
remarks:
“Remember that the question is complicated by the American’s resolute adherence to
the constitutional fiction of equality. As there are no ‘classes’ in the great American
people, so there must be no first, second, or third class on the American railways. Of
course, the theory remains a fiction on the railroad no less than in life. Everyone travels
first class; but those who can pay for it may travel in classes higher than first, called
parlour-cars, drawing-room cars, and so forth. The only real validity of the fiction,
it seems to me, lies in the unfortunate situation it creates with regard to the negro. If
our three classes (or even two) were provided on every train, the mass of the negro
population would, from sheer economic necessity, travel third. It might or might not
be necessary to provide separate cars on that level; but if it were, the discrimination
would not be greatly felt by the grade of black folks it would affect. In the higher-class
cars there would be no reasonable need for discrimination, for the number of negroes
using them would be few in comparison, and personally unobjectionable. The essential
elbow-room would seldom be lacking; conditions in the first and second class would be
very much the same as they are at present in the North.” (Through Afro^America
[1910], pp. 72-73.)
Idem, “But elbow-room is just what the conditions of railway traveling preclude;
wherefore I hold the system of separate cars a legitimate measure of defense against con-
stant discomfort. Had it not been adopted, the South would have been a nation of saints,
not of men. It is in the methods of its enforcement that they sometimes show themselves
not only human but inhuman.” (Ibid,^ p. 72.)
Edwin R. Embree, Brown America (1933; first edition, 1931), p. 20$.
Cited in Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregationy p. 207.
Quoted from ibid,y pp. 195-196. Similar remarks are: “We have always had caste
in the world”; “I imagine the average [Negro] is probably happiest when he is waiting
on white folks and wearing their old clothes.” (See idem,)
William M. Brown, The Crucial Race Question (1907), p. 118.
Charles S. Johnson, Patterns of Negro Segregationy p, 195.
The full gamut of interest motives is suggested by John Dollard (Caste and Class
in a Southern Town [1937], pp. 98-187) in his theory of gains. It should be noted that
Dollard considers these gains—^which he classifies as economic, sexual, and prestige—^as
a means of interpreting and ordering the facts of Negro-white relations in the South.

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