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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - Footnotes - Chapter 14 - Chapter 15
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Footnotes 1269
“Protected business is important in the economic life of the community. Some
$10,000,000 is spent annually on policy playing alone. The game gives employment to
more than 4,000 people and maintains a ^veekly payroll of $40,000 in salaries and com-
missions. No other business in the Negro community is so large or so influential.” (W.
Lloyd Warner, Buford H. Junker, and Walter A. Adams, Color and Human Nature
[1941], p. 19.)
Chapter 15. The Negro In The Public Economy
^
Clearly regressive indirect taxation, such as property, tobacco, liquor, and sales taxes^
and custom duties, made up more than half the total national tax receipts in 1937. (See
the Twentieth Century Fund, Facing the Tax Problem [1937]) pp. 9-25. For a similar
estimate for 1936, see Clarence Hecr, Federal Aid and the Tax Problern^ The Advisory
Committee on Education, Staff Study No. 4 [1939], p. 34.) Some estimates are pre-
sented in this study illustrating the point in the text that taxes were regressive for the
lower and middle income groups; see ibid,^ p. 232.
^The Constitution of the United States does not, of course, say anything directly
about the distribution of public services, or about the principle of “need.” The
relevant phrasing is in Section i of the Fourteenth Amendment:
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immuni-
ties of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
It is to be noted that this requires not only equality but also equality applied to
individuals and not to groups. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court
has consistently required the states to provide equal facilities to individual Negroes, and
this in effect turns out to be the principle of need. If, for example, a state has an
unemployment insurance law, it must apply equally to individual Negroes and individual
whiles, even though Negroes as a group are more benefited because more of them arc
unemployed. Similarly, individual Negroes do not have to pay higher gasoline taxes than
individual whites, even though the entire group of Negroes pays less gasoline taxes
because it buys less gasoline. For this reason we shall refer to the principle of need as
the “constitutional” norm, and we shall regard as unconstitutional any attempt to relate
the distribution of general public services either to a group or to the amount of taxes
paid by an individual or group.
^ An example of this is presented in T. J. Wooftcr, Jr., and Associates, Black Yeo~
manry (1930). The total tax levy for an almost all-Negro community during the period
1 92 1
-1 927 was $16,437, while the total value of services was estimated at $6,837, or
42 per cent of the former amount. (See ibid,y pp. 158-185 and 275.)
^ T. J. Woofter, Jr., for instance, has this to say:
“The democratic theory of public expenditure demands more than common justice.
It demands that the money raised from public taxation be spent where it is most needed,
regardless of the sums which the needy group have paid in. If the policy of expending
money for education in proportion to the amount paid in were adopted, then the rich
districts and wards would bav^ magnificent palaces for public schools and the poorer
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