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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - XI. An American Dilemma - 45. America Again at the Crossroads in the Negro Problem - 7. Tension in the South
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1012 An American Dilemma
split in his moral personality than does the white Northerner. The War
is stirring up the conflict in his soul. The air is filled with reminders of
the great cause of democracy and the equality of peoples, which is the main
issue in the War America is waging against nazism, fascism, and Japanese
imperialism. His ^‘own Negroes” arc making some money, reading the
Negro press and getting restless. The N.A.A.C.P. and other protest organ-
izations are fighting ever more daringly in his own cities. In his newspapers
he reads how the national leaders, from the President down, come out with
blunt denunciations of racial discrimination. He is finding that Northern
leaders are increasingly getting interested in the poll tax, the white pri-
mary, Negro disfranchisement, injustices against Negroes, and other
peculiar Institutions of the South which he guards behind the doctrine of
^^states’ rights.”
What is he supposed to do} Give up Jim Crow and so perhaps allow a
Negro to marry his daughters j
build good schools for Negroes, though
the schools are not too good for his own children; punish white invaders
of Negro rights, though they otherwise may be perfectly good and upright
citizens; relinquish white supremacy? Is he supposed to retreat from all
^^Southern traditions”? He sees ^^outslde aggression” wherever he turns.
This is an old story and a phase of a mental cycle through which the
unfortunate South has often passed before. The fact that this time the white
Southerner’s caste theory is weaker than ever and does not inspire much of
his own intellectual confidence makes his dilemma worse. His emotions
on the color issue are less stable also because his personal ties to the Negro
group have been decreasing, and racial isolation has been intensified during
the last generation. He ‘‘knows the Negro” less well than did his father
and grandfather, though he continues to pretend that he knows him well,
because to “know the Negro” is also a Southern* tradition. Having fewer
personal contacts with Negroes he is likely to exaggerate the signs of oppo-
sition from the Negroes, for he feels that the Negroes have good reason to
develop opposition. The presence in Southern communities of Negro
soldiers, many from the North, increases his uneasiness. Du Bois, writing
about the First World War, talks about:
... the deep resentment mixed with the pale ghost of fear which Negro soldiers
call up in the breast of the white South. It is not so much that they fear that the
Negro will strike if he gets a chance, but rather that they assume with curious
unanimity that he has reason to strike, that any other persons in his circumstances, or
treated as he is would rebel. Instead of seeking to relieve the cause of such a possible
feeling, most of them strain every effort to bottle up the black man^s resentment.^^
In the present crisis, Guion G. Johnson, a liberal Southern white histo-
rian, could already in July, 1941, report from the South that
. . . there has been some uneasiness that “our Negroes” are being tampered with,
ikjxi white advopates of racial goodwill have occasionally found it jmore ditficuJi
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