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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 - 10. Boosting Negro Business
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8oo An American Dilemma
mount." Again the explanation of this lack of intellectual clarity and per-
sistence cannot be given simply in terms of the relatively undeveloped
state of scientific social engineering in America. For in most other fields at
least attempts at rational practical thinking and social planning are present.
The explanation will have to be sought in moral taboos. The whites also
are inhibited by the American Creed from thinking constructively along
segregation lines. They may observe and analyze scientifically the segrega-
tion system as it works; they may condone it implicitly or explicitly as
advantageous or inevitable under the circumstances; they may do it with
eyes open to the sufferings and inefficiencies in the system as it is. But they
cannot permit themselves to think through carefully and in any detail how
a segregation system could be rationally organized. For this would imfly
an ofen break with the principles of equality and liberty.
The extraordinary thing is how the national ethos works, in the short
run, as a bar against clear and constructive thinking toward mitigating the
inequalities which, contrary to the American Creed, are inflicted upon a
weak group. In the long run, this same Creed might come to save, not only,
as now, America’s face, but perhaps also its soul.**
10. Boosting Negro Business
The idea that the development of a Negro middle class of landowners,
businessmen, and professionals would have importance in the fight for
equality and opportunity is old with the Negro people. It was pronounced
before the Civil War. It played an important role in Booker T. Washing-
ton’s philosophy:
. . . wherever 1 have seen a black man who was succeeding in his business, who was a
taxpayer and who possessed intelligence and high character, that individual was treated
with the highest respect by the members of the white race. In proportion as we can
multiply these examples. North and South, will our problem be solved.^”*
In 1900 he founded the National Negro Business League, which is still
functioning. The resolution drawn up by the business section at the first
meeting of the National Negro Congress, in 1936, made it equally clear
that Negro business is much more than “business”:
The development of sound and thriving Negro business is most indispensable to the
general elevation of the Negro’s social and economic security ... all Negroes con-
sider it their inescapable duty to support Negro business by their patronage.^®
The same advice has been given the Negro people by their white friends
through generations. Upon this theory Negro education, particularly along
Southern white writers are no real exception. It is true—as we have shown in earliei
parts of this inquiry—that they often in general ternu plead for certain alleviations of
unnecessary suffering inflicted upon the Negroes at the same time as they hold to the
necessity of the caste system. But there their thinking stops.
"See Chapter 1.
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