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Chapter 2. Encountering the Negro Problem 47
Negro in both South and North, is the loser. Meanwhile each of the two
guilty regions points to the other’s sins—^the South assuaging its conscience
by the fact that “the Negro problem is finally becoming national in scope”
and the North that “Negroes are much worse off in the South.”
The Civil War, even if it does not figure so highly in Northern con-
sciousness as the corresponding memories in the South, is a definite source
of historical pride in the North. Many families, particularly in the higher
social classes which contain “Old Americans,” have ancestors who fought
in the War, the recollection of which carries emotional identification with
the Northern cause. The teaching in the schools of the North spreads an
identification and a vicarious pride even to the Northerners whose ancestors
were Europeans at the time of the Civil War. The liberation of the slaves
plays an important part in this idealization. But, paradoxically enough, it
turns against the Negro in his present situation: “We gave him full
citizenship,” the Northerner will say. “Now it is his own funeral if he
hasn’t got the guts to take care of himself. It would be an injustice in the
opposite direction to do more for him than for people in general just
because of his race. The Negro shouldn’t be the ward of the nation. Look
at all other poor, hardworking people in America. My grandfather had
to sweat and work before he got through the mill.”
This rationalized political valuation, which can be heard anywhere in the
North, goes back to the Northern ideological retreat and the national com-
promise of the 1870’s. It still, in disguised forms, creeps into even the
scientific writings of Yankee authors. Donald Young, for example, writes:
With the Civil War came emancipation, enfranchisement, and guaranties of equal
rights for black and white. If anything, Northern politicians did their best to give
the Negro a favored status which in effect would have made him almost a ward of
the government. . . . Although a reaction to slavery was naturally to be expected, it
would have been a mistake to give the f-reedman any more protection from private
or public persecution than is afforded a citizen of any other color. Fortunately, the
United States Supreme Court and the post-Civil War decline in emotionalism and
increase in political sanity prevented the consummation of such attempts at special
Negro legislation protection as the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and
Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill originally intendedr^
The logic of this argument is weak. From the basic equalitarian assump-
tion, it could not, of course, be deemed to be an unjust favoring of the
Negro people on account of their race, if they were protected from the
specific discriminations which are inflicted upon them just because of their
race. Guaranteeing them civil liberties as citizens could not be said to be
making them the wards of the nation in this particular sense. But even if
this Northern rationalization is, in fact, an escape notion like many others
we have found in the South, it is not charged with much emotion. The
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