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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 38. Negro Popular Theories - 9. Condoning Segregation
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798 An American Dilemma
Bois in his old age when he has become pessimistic about erasing the color
bar in a reasonable future. Instead he urges the building up of a cooperative
black economy for defense and mutual aid:
To a degree, but not completely, this is a program of segregation. The consumer
group is in important aspects a self-segregated group. We are now segregated largely
without reason. Let us put reason and power beneath this segregation.^^
A few important reservations must now be stressed. One is that few
upper class Negroes are prepared to follow Du Bois into this open endorse-
ment of segregation. A second is that Du Bois—like Booker T. Washington
before him and practically all other Negro pleaders for a positive utilization
of segregation—does not accept segregation as an ultimate solution but
rather expects that the policy recommended will favor its earlier break-
down. Speaking particularly about segregated housing and rural settlement
projects, he explains:
Rail if you will against the race segregation here Involved and condoned, but take
advantage of it by planting secure centers of Negro co-operative effort and particularly
of economic power to make us spiritually free for initiative and creation in other and
wider fields, and for eventually breaking down all segregation based on color or
curl of hair.*
A third reservation is even more important, though it can only by implica-
tion be inferred from what is said or written. Neither Du Bois nor any
other Negro leader will be found prepared to urge the full utilization of
segregation, which would be advantageous if segregation were accepted as
an ultimate solution of the Negro problem.
A Negro leader, who really accepted segregation and stopped criticizing
it, could face the dominant whites with a number of far-reaching demands.
If, thus, Negroes accepted as final their disfranchisement in the South and
condoned the exclusion of Negroes from politics, they could reasonably
ask for a wide amount of self-government for Negroes. They could demand
the right to elect their own school boards and governing bodies for their
own hospitals and other public institutions. They could ask for Negro
policemen to protect the Negro communities and perhaps even for separate
lower Negro courts to settle civil and criminal cases between Negroes.
Certain problems of fiscal clearing and white supervision would have to be
settled, but with some legal ingenuity they could be solved. It would even
be reasonable to ask for separate state and national representations of the
disfranchised Southern Negroes. Even if such a representative body should
have only the right to discuss and petition regarding legislation which
W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn (1940), p. 215. Tlie present writer does not
share the optimism contained in the last part of this statement. Better utilization of
segregation by Negroes wiU give the caste system a certain moral sanction and, probably
even more important, will fortify it by Negro vested interesu.
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