Civil, Rights for the Negro

by RALPH MCGILL

1

THE problem of race relations is a national one. Continued immigration will increasingly emphasize this fact. But the case for civil rights and the present dilemma of Negro-white relationships are largely the problems of the South because of the vis-a-vis fact of population.

The fight for civil rights should be concentrated on one phase of the problem — that of voting. As I see it, democracy consists basically in every citizen’s having equality before the law and in every qualified person’s having the right to participate in choosing the officials who will govern him. This right, to vote is the basic civil right. All the others are a part of its mosaic structure. In this civil right is the specific for the ills of all other rights.

For example, the poll tax as a prerequisite for voting remains as a restriction on the electorate in seven states. It is slowly disappearing. It will disappear last where the racial population figures are most nearly equal. It is natural this should be so. But the poll tax was never merely a barrier against the Negro ballot. It kept as many, if not more, white persons from the voting booth. It will disappear as soon as other discriminations against the ballot are removed. And they are much easier to eliminate.

The Supreme Court of the United States has abolished the white primary, which was the real anti-Negro barrier, withholding from him the status of full citizenship. If the full weight, advice, and assistance of the Justice Department, could be thrown into the measure so that all the various camouflaged imitations of the white primary may be brought quickly into Federal courts and found to be against the letter and spirit of the Constitution of the United States, the victory for civil rights would be won much earlier than through the slow, tedious procedure of Congressional legislation.

In 1948 the Negro vote in the old South was an impressive 600 per cent larger than in 1940, with a total of a little more than 700,000 registered. Three years hence there should be 2,000,000. With 5,000,000 Negroes of voting age in the former Confederate states, there could be more than twice that many if the various imitations of the white primary system were ruled out in time.

Competition for the Negro vote is already a fact in the states of the old Confederacy, and the Negro knows it. Competition for that vote is an open sesame to rights. Competition for that vote has already paved ugly streets, put Negro police in uniform, established Negro fire stations, put Negroes in minor elective offices, equalized some school salaries, built new schools, and constructed parks and playgrounds.

In some of our municipal elections this year, that competition was keen. It was true of all Southern cities. In Atlanta there were four candidates for the Democratic nomination for mayor, a nomination equivalent to election. All four attended Negro ward meetings, spoke in Negro churches, heard appeals for a fire station, more Negro police, more schools, and so on.

The Southern politician, when he goes to a Negro political meeting seeking Negro votes, is made aware of—and is sometimes shocked by—the fact that the Negro’s rights have been neglected for so long that the Negro is in a strong strategic position to ask a great deal from politicians. And he is asking. Out loud. In public. Unafraid.

The regular Democrats, as the Philadelphia convention so starkly revealed, are forced to fight the emotional onslaught of tradition, which varies with the states, but they will make, and indeed already are making, more and more concessions. The Republicans, having lost the Negro vote in 1930, eye the growing number of voters as a field ripe for the harvest of recruiting. They, too, will make concessions.

When sheriffs, county commissioners, mayors, and governors compete for votes and seek new votes from the continually increasing total of Negro voters, then indeed will they begin to do what some so flagrantly fail to do — prevent violence and lynchings. Those of us who insist that the states properly, and even constitutionally, are responsible for law enforcement ceased to argue the point, long ago in the face of cynical, even farcical, trials and the brutal callousness which simply ignored some lvnchings. Federal legislation in this field may he unconstitutional, but we say let’s adopt a bill and sec. The people are far ahead of the Congress on this issue.

While there was sound and fury from Southern Congressmen concerning the poll tax and the antilynching legislation, this was merely the emotional onslaught of a dubious tradition. There never was much opposition from the people. Ihe only real furor was caused by the proposed Fair Employment Practices Act and the several hills introduced. Indeed, one of the troubles has been that civil rights, in the minds of many persons, have been confused with specific pieces of legislation, to the detriment of civil rights.

2

THERE was much distortion of the meaning of the Fair Employment Practices Act. It silled down to the crossroads as meaning social equality; as forced social mixing of the races; as a prelude to compulsory intermarriage and worse. It had police in it as indeed one of the bills did — and it had courts and jails as its coercive weapons. It was never possible to discuss the bill in any climate of the will to hear. It isn’t now possible.

To be honest, most of the Southern progressives have opposed some of the proposed Fair Employment Practices legislation. They would favor an ad which would produce investigation, conciliation, and recommendations, liut we do not regard it as a field where fiat will replace the admittedly slower processes of education and attempts by the people of both races to conciliate. We think a bill with the coercive powers of police and court and jail is a load which might prove too heavy. Such a coercive act is regarded by many of us as questionable democracy. It seems to us more of an effort to legislate in the field of morals and social doctrine. We keep thinking of prohibition enforcement. And we ask one another, If one bureau is given its enforcement police, why will not another and yet another ask and receive?

A recent study by a faculty committee at Tuskegee Institute, discussing not the FEPC but the historic problem of employment and the relationship of Negro colleges to it, said: —

“The confusing ferment of opinions with which the daily press and the Negro weeklies, the periodicals, and ihe current output of the book publishers are confronted suggests that the examination of the race relationships is a continuing process. These relationships won’t be made adequate by one-sided solutions or sugar-coated panaceas. Our nation, in spite of partial knowledge and much confusion, persists in its endeavor to improve race relationships in terms of the democratic concept. As it does so, a survey of the facts indicates that most issues arise only incidentally from race, but rather, directly from those factors which govern all human relat ionships.

“One of the unsolved problems of ihe South is too many people and too few resources. The Negro problem cannot be isolated and treated separately from the overpopulation of the South.

“Efforts have been too much on the moral-legalistic side, and not enough on the sustenance stile. Populations gel grouped into communities according 1 o the function they perform in keeping the communities alive. Historically, the function of the Negro in the South has been that of an unskilled laborer. As soon as technology advanced far enough to perform the function of the skilled worker he was no longer needed for the efficient operation of the community. The South in particular, and the nation in general, have been unwilling to accept the Negro in any other category of community life. The reason for this is fairly simple. There have never been enough skilled and professional jobs in the South for the white population. It is not likely that groups in power, without a compelling motivation of the importance and soundness of democratic participation, would willingly give up favored positions to less advantaged groups.

“Unless we can implement our ideals of fair play by finding a way through the coöperative efforts of capital, technology, and educational institutions to create enough job opportunities in the nation to fully employ the whole labor force, wc cannot expect too much progress in securing for Negroes a larger measure of opportunity.

“Before advocating action programs for dealing with the race problem we suggest that Negro colleges, in cooperation with other colleges, make a scientific investigation of the following areas: —

“Population. . . . We need to know how many people the resources ol the South can support. We need to know how much capital and technological wealth is necessary to develop these resources to their fullest and most efficient use.

“Migration. We need to know what skills we will need to import from areas outside the South to develop our resources, and we need to know the job needs of areas outside the South so that we can train our excess population for these jobs. Negro colleges, in particular, may explore the migration possibilities to other regions, and courses of study to train Negroes for these jobs outside the region.

“Techniques of Minorities. There is the possibility that the race problem in the South has much in common with the problem of minority peoples in other parts of the world, and the immigrants to America from other parts of the world. A study of how these groups adjusted, and the barriers they had to encounter, may lead to fruitful techniques of handling the problem here. “Desirable as it is to preach and legislate evils out of society this method seldom, if ever, works. Negroes and many of the whites in the South are being affected by the forces of declining farm opportunities, and increasing farm mechanization and livestock pasture farming. Unfortunately displaced agricultural workers fail to become absorbed in industrial jobs as fasl as they are being pushed off the farm. The solution of the human problem of the South is too intricate and involved to be left to people of good intention but who lack the necessary knowledge to deal with the issues involved. Fortunately colleges serving both white and Negro youth may share substantially in reaching solutions through the development of leadership and in the conduct of continuing studies on the problems listed in this statement.”

That is a fairly lengthy quote, but I regard it as most pertinent.

We are a region which has never had enough jobs. As industry comes, and as more Negroes come to the ballot box, this economic and social condition will change. But jobs by fiat in a region historically shorl of jobs would not work out. The laws would be unenforceable. I believe we are correct in saying a majority of Southern Negroes, while wanting an FEPC, prefer one of investigation, arbitration, conciliation, and not one with coercive police powers.

3

THERE is a great deal of misunderstanding about segregation, which in varying degrees is a national institution. In the South, the pattern called segregation is deeply written in social custom and heavily written in law. In the North, it is not the law, although it has found its way into custom in by no means negligible quantity, as may be seen by any who choose to look.

Segregation is a broad and fluid term. All its students and all its practitioners are agreed as to its unpredictability and flexibility at its fringes. It changes as society changes. Various forces work to make its maintenance more difficult. Universal education and universal segregation are uneasy bedfellows. The complexity of the industrial economy and of the growing administrative services which accompany modern society has brought into being wide areas of life even in the South in which the institution breaks down. One Southern state, it is true, by law requires the segregation of operatives in mills so that white people alone must work in a weaving room and colored people alone must work in a picker room; but it is significant that this statute, now many decades old, has not been copied.

With the growth of the Negro vote, a good many signs appear that in state and local administration, as well as in the Federal government, Negro views arc being sought on policy matters. There have been some significant recent appointments of Negroes to boards and commissions, in Southern states, which govern the expenditure of important amounts of public money.

When public education was a matter of one-room schools, two such schools in each neighborhood were no great drain on the public purse. When a consolidated school building costs several hundred thousand dollars and its technical and vocational equipment is expensive too, here and there ways will be found to reduce the rigidity of school segregation. The states which maintain segregation in education are face to face with the cost of providing entirely equal if separate facilities. The changing pattern in the graduate education in states around the Southern borders undoubtedly foreshadows further modification in colleges and, at a later stage, in secondary education.

There is a more obscure factor, too. The customs of a segregated society were formed at a time when the two peoples, living side by side, were widely different in their cultural inheritance. That gap closes every year. The educated South, long ago, found ways in which to work on matters of common interest with colored people of equal attainments, in a courtesy that bears only vestigial traces of the separateness beneath. That area of common understanding and common courtesy broadens as to the number of persons it includes and as to the fields which it invades. It broadens now into the whole field of trade-unionism and into organizations of farmers.

It is against this background that the forces of reform, progress, reaction, and violence are at work. The Klan activity is vicious, but it is local in influence; and its violence — also local, directed by no central authority — is a part of the struggle to slow down the breaking up of the old patterns. There are sadistic, evil men in the various Klans. There are even a few good, well-meaning persons who are not informed but are easily led and made afraid. There are also the cynical phonies who make the profits. But the Klan is finished, although its philosophy and methods will endure here and there in the old plantation counties where cotton and timber are gone, the economy is poor, and a few men control the politics.

As Booker T. Washington sensibly advised, we are letting down our buckets where we are.

We earnestly believe the bucket which will drawup the most water of success is that of the ballot. The best rights come from it. The barriers before it are by no means iron curtains. They are pushovers, if really tested by the Constitution.