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CHAPTER 9
ECONOMIC INEQUALITY
I. Negro Poverty
The economic situation of the Negroes in America is pathological.
Except for a small minority enjoying upper or middle class status, the
masses of American Negroes, in the rural South and in the segregated
slum quarters in Southern and Northern cities, are destitute. They own
little property; even their household goods are mostly inadequate and
dilapidated. Their incomes are not only low but irregular. They thus live
from day to day and have scant security for the future. Their entire culture
and their individual interests and strivings are narrow.
These generalizations will be substantiated and qualified in the following
chapters. For this purpose the available information is immense, and we
shall, in the main, be restricted to brief summaries. Our interest in this part
of our inquiry will be to try to unravel the causal relations underlying the
abnormal economic status of the American Negro. We want to understand
how it has developed and fastened itself upon the economic fabric of
modern American society. It is hoped that out of a study of trends and
situations will emerge an insight into social and economic dynamics which
will allow inferences as to what the future holds for the economic well-
being of the American Negro people. This future development will depend
in part upon public policy, and we shall discuss the various alternatives for
induced change. Certain value premises will be made explicit both in order
to guide our theoretical approach and to form the basis for the practical
analysis.
Before we proceed to select our specific value premises, let us ask this
question: Why is such an extraordinarily large proportion of the Negro
people so poor? The most reasonable way to start answering this question
is to note the distribution of the Negro people in various regions and
occupations. We then find that the Negroes are concentrated in the South,
which is generally a poor and economically retarded region. A dispropor-
tionate number of them work in agriculture, which is a depressed industry.
Most rural Negroes are in Southern cotton agriculture, which is particu-
larly over-populated; backward in production methods; and hard hit by
soil exhaustion, by the boll weevil, and by a long-time fall in international
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