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An American Dilemma
1380
Following the Color Line (l908)> p. II,
Claude McKay, A Long Way from Home (1937), p. 227.
**(1934). P- 7-
Negro Americansy
What Now?
^
p. 6.
Archer observes:
“Once let a dozen white men be killed by armed negroes in any city of the South,
and a flame would burst out all over the land which would work untold devastation before
either authority or humanity could check it. The incident would be taken as a declara-
tion of racial war; everywhere the white mob would insist on searching for arms in the
negro quarters; the negroes would inevitably attempt some panic-stricken defensive
organization; and the more effective it proved, the more terrible would be the calamity
to their race. Not even in the wildest frenzy, of course, could the race, or a tenth part
of the race, be violently wiped out; but they might be so dismayed and terrorized as to
lose that natural buoyancy of spirit which has hitherto sustained them, and enabled
them to increase and multiply. The prophets of extinction already read hopelessness and
a prescience of doom in the negro tone of mind; but, so far, 1 think the wish is father
to the thought. The race, as a whole, is confident, in its happy-go-lucky way. But would
their spirit survive a great massacre, followed by an open and chronic Negerhetze?
I doubt it . . {Op cit,, pp. 206-207.)
The only white passers the author has personally observed were two cases of white
women married to Negro men, who found it convenient to call themselves Negroes.
Donald Young informs us: “. . . occasionally persons of unmixed white ancestry have
deliberately passed thcmsch^es off as Negroes, presumably in the main because of a
preference for Negro associations and for employment opportunities, as in a colored
orchestra.^’ {Research Memorandum on Minority Peoples in the Depression^ p. 28.)
Sometimes white orphans have been brought up in Negro households and voluntarily
retain the caste status of their foster parents. See a special investigation by Louis Wirth
and Herbert Goldhamer, “The Hybrid and the Problem of Miscegenation,” in Otto
Klincbcrg (editor), Characteristics of the American Negro, prepared for this study;
to be published, manuscript page 75.
See ibid., manuscript pages 97-98 and quoted sources.
Ibid,, manuscript pages 83-84.
Ibid., manuscript page 89.
A Negro’s comment cited by Baker, op. cit., p. 161.
Charles S. Johnson, op. cit., p. 301.
Chapter 32. The Negro Class Structure
^
The resentment against the rising Negro takes concrete forms: . . ‘even the rea-
sonable Southerner,’ ” William Archer quotes a Southerner as saying,
“ ‘feels a certain
bitterness on the subject of education when he sees the black child marching oS to a school
provided by Northern philanthropy, while the child of the “poor white” goes into the
cotton-factory.’ ” {Through Afro-America [1910], p. 17.) The fact that this is an
exception, that white children on the average arc much better provided for, and that
employment in the cotton industry is one of the best protected caste monopolies in
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