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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 38. Negro Popular Theories - 10. Boosting Negro Business
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Chapter 38. Negro Popular Theories 801
Tuskegee lines, has been aided and directed. Sir Harry Johnston, review-
ing the Negro problem in the beginning of this century, pointed to the
Jews and drew this lesson:
Money solves all human difficulties. It will buy you love and respect, power and
social standing. With money you can create armies and build navies, you can control
the votes of your fellow-citizens, found and shape their educational institutes, con-
duct a Press, overcome disease, make actual the charity of early Christianity, achieve
all purposes that are noble, and check the Devil at every turn; whether he crop up in
the forms of alcoholism, disease, intestinal worms, religious intolerance, political
oppression, waste of the earth’s natural resources, or the misuse of corrugated iron.
If you are rich you can roof your dwellings with tiles of the most beautiful, or stone
slabs, or wooden shingles, marble terraces or leaden sheets; if you are poor you must
content yourself with corrugated iron and know that your dwelling is a blot on the
landscape.
The one undoubted solution of the Negro’s difficulties throughout the world is for
him to turn his strong arms and strong legs, his fine sight, subtle hearing, deft fingers,
and rapidly-developed brain to making of Money . .
And through the decades, Negroes have been told by white people and by
their own leaders that in business they have fair chances. Moton stated it
thus:
It is in business, perhaps, that the Negro gets more honest consideration and a
fairer deal than in any other of his contacts with the white men, not even excepting
religion.^^
Business will stimulate the Negroes initiative, give him valuable training
and experience, increase his self-confidence,- increase his wealth, create a
relatively secure middle and upper class, give employment to Negroes in
the lower classes, and provide a reservoir of resources which can be used in
competition with the whites. ^^Business’^ in this popular theory includes all
free professions. The scant success in building up a substantial Negro
business and professional class and the explanations of this have been
reviewed in Chapter 14. But the ideology is more alive than ever. Practi-
cally all Negro businessmen and professionals met in the course of this
study have this theory. It is preached in church and taught in school.
Its popularity is understandable. Negro professionals and business men
—except those to whom caste gives an absolute monopoly, as it does to
most teachers in Negro schools and colleges, preachers, morticians, beau-
ticians—have to compete with whites and have to seek to build up a relative
monopoly by appealing to racial solidarity. Their standards are often lower
than those of their white competitors. And they meet suspicion from the
Negro customers. The last phenomenon, observed by all students, is well
stated by Bunche:
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