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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - IX. Leadership and Concerted Action - 41. The Negro School - 4. The Whites’ Attitudes toward Negro Education
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894 An American Dilemma
By itself, the interest of upholding the caste system would motivate
Southern whites to give Negroes practically no education at all or would
restrict it to the transmission of only such lowly skills as would make
Negroes better servants and farm hands. There is no mistake about this
interest j
it is real and has economic importance. Charles S. Johnson gives
an account of it as it appears in the rural South:
Literacy is not an asset in the plantation economy, and it was not only discouraged
but usually forbidden. The belief that education spoiled the slave carried over with
but little modification for many years into the belief that education spoils a field
hand. The oldest members of the community are illiterate, and in those working
relations which reveal least change from the past this lack has proved no important
handicap. Reading and figuring carry elements of danger to established relations.
Since the detailed direction of planting and handling of accounts are the sphere of
the planter, theoretically it is he who can profit most from the technique of literacy.
Too much attention to reading about the outside, and particularly to figuring, on the
part of Negro tenants, would surely make them less satisfied with their status and
bring them into harsh conflict with the system. The need of enough education to
read and figure arises largely among those families desirous of escaping from the
dependent relationship under the old plantation system.^®
The poorer classes of whites in this respect have interests similar to those
of the planters. They are in competition with Negroes for jobs and for
social status. One of the things which demarcates them as superior and
increases the future potentialities of their children is the fact that white
children in publicly supported school buses are taken to fine consolidated
schools while often Negro children are given only what amounts to a sham
education in dilapidated one-room schools or old Negro churches by under-
paid, badly trained Negro teachers. The observer, visiting Southern rural
counties, gets clear statements of these interests on the part of all classes of
whites who want to preserve the traditional caste order. The segregated
school system of the South, in addition, allows a substantial saving by
keeping Negro education low.
The caste interest is not merely economic. The whites have told them-
selves that education will make the Negro conscious of ‘lights” which he
Association Research Bulletin [November, 1940], p. 204.) A cross section of the nation
was asked, “Do you think that the same amount of tax money should be spent in this state
for the education of a Negro child as for a white child?” Southern whites were split
equally: 45 per cent answered “yes”} 46 per cent answered “no” (9 per cent are reported as
having “no opinion”). Northern whites were in favor of equal educational expenditures by
a heavy majority: 86 per cent answered “yes”} 10 per cent answered “no” (4 per cent
are reported as having “no opinion”).
The large minority in favor of equality in the South is remarkable. As a guide for
practical policy, however, it has to be discounted because of the peculiarity, which we noticed
in Chapter 28 and elsewhere, that Southern whites often become convinced by their legal
pretense “separate but equal” that Negroes actually get equal schooling.
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