Continued…
Take, for example, Patterns of Negro Segregation, by Charles S. Johnson,(1) professor of Sociology and Director of the department of Social Sciences at Fisk University. The “patterns” are traced in bounteous detail, with due attention to all kinds of segregation and all variant practices; the “reactions” of the Negroes and the “rationalizations” of the whites are classified. It is a study of very high competence, and it never falters until it reaches the difficult crux of Custom and Law. Then the good sociologist becomes a bad historian and a partisan who will stop at nothing .
In his chapter, “The Evolution of Racial Legislation,” Dr. Johnson says that Law “exercises the vital function of ensuring the stability and uniformity of customary practices approved by the dominant society.” Later he adds, with reference to the Reconstruction acts: “The attempt politically to force a legal framework of equality upon a customary order incompatible with it met with no success whatever.” Nevertheless, even in this chapter, the various laws passed by the Southern states with the purpose of controlling race relations are represented as an attempt to support a tottering and weakened fabric of customary relations against the challenge posed by “freedom, with the implication of equality.” The treatment of historical circumstances is sketchy, and an unwary reader, not in possession of the historical context, might suppose that “freedom, with the implication of equality,” represented a commendable rise of Custom, somehow miraculously engendered by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, and that therefore the South, in devising legal restrictions for the Negro, was setting Law against Custom, rather than the contrary.
The conclusion of the book goes still further. Urbanization and industrialization, we are told, are the forces now “eroding custom,” and they have made it necessary for the South to continue its restrictive laws. The argument then proceeds by analogy. Modern democratic theory is called upon to furnish the miraculous element formerly supplied by the Fourteenth Amendment. We are informed that two fundamental principles have shaped American institutions: “free individualistic initiative, and racialism.” “Free individualistic initiative” worked very well while we had a moving frontier and abundant natural resources. But in the end the free play of individualism had to be checked, since it was endangering freedom. The government had to step in with “rigid controls and regulations” to restore democracy.
So, likewise, for the principle of “racialism.” The book ends with the following passage:
The effects of the unrestrained operation of the principle of racialism are conceivably as dangerous to American society as the unrestricted play of free competition in the economic sphere.
Logically, it would be appropriate for government to impose controls and regulations, as mandatory as those imposed on its economic life, to ensure to all its racial minorities not only free by equal participation in the economic and political life of the country. In fact, before the present war is ended, such action may become a political necessity.
Thus the sociologist, after filling three hundred pages with his skeptical inquiry into segregation, abandons all skepticism when he seeks his remedy. He does not engage in historical examination into the results of former applications of legislative remedy. He does not ask whether legislation to end racial discrimination is really analogous to economic legislation, or whether it will work. He does not ask whether the political theory involved is, as he infers, good democratic theory. He is ready to accept, in a field outside his own, a magic which he would rigorously scrutinize if it appeared in his own field.
But this is the pit into which sociology, and, indeed, much of social science, is always falling. With dismal unanimity, the fourteen Negro authors of the symposium, What the Negro Wants,(2) leap into the same golf. The fourteen are prominent leaders of one branch or another of Negro opinion. Most of them are learned men of proved ability. The editor of the volume, Rayford W. Logan, is professor of history at Howard University. Two of them are practicing sociologists. One, Doxey A. Wilkerson, is a Communist. The others are college presidents, labor leaders, editors, writers. Most of them make passing reference to the historical context of the Negro problem, but, with only one or two doubtful exceptions, they assume the sociological abstraction of the problem from the historical context as legitimate, and then call for the extirpation of Custom by Law.
The most moderate are Leslie Pinckney Hill and Gordon B. Hancock, who enunciate a somewhat vague program of gradualism, tinged with religion. But Dr. Hancock says, in pure sociological terms: “The color question is a social problem and, as such, is not essentially different from any other social problem….It responds to the same processes of adjustment or maladjustment.”
The most extreme, if we omit the Communist agitator, is satirical George S. Schuyler, who writes on “The Caucasian Problem.” He proposes – not, I think, as part of his satire – that both white and colored people be re-conditioned to think of themselves as the same. “It would probably be necessary,” he points out, “to have drastic laws against manifestations of color prejudice and discrimination, just as we have legislated against kidnaping, arson, and murder.”
Marxist tendencies appear here and there. Charles H. Wesley speaks of racial discrimination as “fascist racism,’ and calls for united action by white and black workers. A. Philip Randolph, organizer of the March on Washington Movement and head of Pullman Porter’s Union, views the American Civil War as a “liberal bourgeois democratic, socio-economic, political revolution{which
failed to complete its basic historic mission.” Although he excludes Communists from the MOWM and advocates”non-violent” methods of Negro protest, it is clear that the technique of mass demonstration practiced by the MOWM owes much to Marxist procedures. Langston Hughes, raging against Jim Crow laws, find Hitleristic tendencies in the South and in regular Communist style puts the liberal Mark Etheridge and the standpat Talmadge in the same bed. He proposes to send W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Lillian Smith, and Erskine Caldwell to lecture the Southern people, with a guard of soldiers “to protect them from the fascist-minded among us.” Sterling Brown says that certain Southern “intellectuals” (Allen Tate, F.L. Owsley, David Cohn, Mark Ethridge, John Temple Graves and others including myself) “do not talk very differently from Gerald L. K. Smith’ – whom he classifies as a “native fascist.”
In general, these writers accept the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as having unquestioned validity and merit. One of them, the historian Logan, advocates enforcement of the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which would reduce Southern representation in Congress. When they invoke “democracy,” as they all do, it is not the democracy of Jefferson or, for that matter, of Lincoln (whose name and fame curiously enough, receive no particular adoration in their discourses), but the democracy of the New Deal, with its strong leaning toward collectivism, its emphasis on economic rather than political government, its convenient notion that the state is the unique source of its citizen’s welfare.
Some would carry the race issue beyond national boundaries and use international politics as an instrument to benefit the Negro within the United States. Others would work through the labor movement. Still others would prefer a straight political attack. But no matter what the route taken, the final instrument would be Federal legislation.
Among the fourteen, there are no important differences as to “what the Negro wants.” All want equality – not the legal fiction of equality, but the substantial reality, in the South and everywhere else. They want political equality, economic equality, and, yes, social equality, so far as social equality is obtainable by legal removal of the more obvious discriminations. They would abolish “public segregation’ and probably would expect a good deal of private segregation to be abolished too. Some openly advocate repeal of state laws prohibiting racial intermarriage – on the specious ground, accepted in no civilized or savage society, that marriage is an individual, private affair, not affected with the public interest. They approve the Fair Employment Practices Committee. One of them frankly affirms that this device is, as Southern critics have charged, an attack upon the “social fabric” of the South.
(1). Harper and Brothers. New York. 160 pages. 1943 $2.50.
(2). University of North Carolina Press. Chapel Hill. 176 pages. 1944 $3.50.
