Digitized by the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center
Howard University, 2017.
ISBN: ajc_342
Original page scans available in the original archive, linked below:
https://dh.howard.edu/ajc_published/9
Another Apostle of Race Integrity
The crop of literary solutions of the race problem by gratuitous assumptions and statistical charts and graphs is gradually taking on a slightly less abusive and contemptuous tone while losing none of its nervy determination to find or make a place for the American Negro, put him in it and keep him there.
Even the author of the “Rising Tide of Color” in his discussion in the Forum with Dr. Locke disclaims the purpose to marshal his forces on the old “Inferiority argument.” Negro music, Negro art, and Negro poetry, drama, and cinema have won an interest amounting to a fad in the ever restless, ever changing taste of the American public. Nevertheless it is worthy of note that the old propaganda cult has the same passwords and secret countersign, however neatly padded superficially with sympathetic and even laudatory phrasing to catch the eye and tickle the fancy of the Negro public who have been but lately discovered as able to read, analyse and talk back.
The Reverend A. H. Shannon, former chaplain of Mississippi State Penitentiary has brought forth a book on The Negro in Washington, A Study in Race Amalgamation; using Washington merely as a peg on which to hang his general preachment for what he calls “re-patriation” i. e. a national arrangement for unscrambling the mess by removing to the Upper Congo (and to Abyssinia for mulattoes) all normal and healthy Negroes reaching the age of 21 or younger who marry and produce children. He argues from the enthusiasm created by Garvey that the Negroes themselves would be 10 to 1 glad of the chance to escape persecution from race prejudice here if assured of the opportunity to found a Negro state under most favorable circumstances. All this is worked out in the pure desire of “philanthropy” to preserve the Negro’s race integrity and save him from vicious whites as well as to keep “the stream of Caucasian protoplasm” pure from pollution by his presence.
“The courts fail utterly,” he wails, “in reference to race protection. Religion has failed to control the situation. Race prejudice has failed as a complete control and will continue so to fail. Only complete separation of the races can prove a complete protection for either race.”
I shall not attempt here to review the book since it contains little that has not been answered over and over beyond the very serious clash he attempts to foment among shades of colored people themselves.
"White" & "Black" work side by side - North American Aviation Co. Plant. Photographer unknown. date=1882-1944. Source: National Archives, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Public Domain Photographs Collection. (id: 195477) | |
Photograph of a Black machinist apprentice learning from a white veteran employee. Photographer unknown. May, 1942. Source: National Archives, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library Public Domain Photographs Collection. (id: 196338) Original caption: “From the aged and the youth, from the white and the Negro come the skills which will make America impregnable. A veteran employee in a eastern navy yard instructs a machinist apprentice in the operation of an important machine.” |
The one bit of really significant propaganda which I consider of vital and pressing importance is what he has to say regarding unemployment of the unskilled white man. “The matter of the poor white is one of the most serious problems of the present day. America can learn much from South Africa.” Quoting Sir Walter Hutchins who speaks of the poor white class of Natal: “Kaffirs’ work they will not do, skilled work they cannot do. They sink and sink, live in misery and wretchedness, objects of compassion and contempt even to the natives, relying, not a few of them on the natives to preserve them from starvation." Here in America, Shannon continues, a similar situation is the direct result of colored environment. There has been no effort, he charges, to protect the poor white from the competition of the Negro. Those who must work in order to live, find on seeking seeking employment they must meet conditions created by the Negro, accept his wage; show his docility, do his work, or there is no place for them in a Negro dominated industrial order.”
Not long since the daily news noted a white man who went to a factory seeking work. The employer told him to come in the next morning. On his way out he saw a solitary Negro at work and asked how long he had had the job. He was told, and he peremptorily ordered the Negro to clear out. The man thus ordered left at once and was shot in the back dead in his tracks as he was making his way from the place of his employment.
The economic situation looms even more grave than either the social or political, if they can be isolated and viewed in contrast. It is a situation that cannot be conquered by force nor negotiated by logic. Only the counter tactics of mutual help and racial patronage dictated by enlightened group enterprise can hope to furnish even partial and gradual relief. But it will help some.